For even the smallest of events (such as the primary school class 3A Easter Hat Show), the event manager should undertake a formal planning stage, including a risk assessment (explained in Chapter 5, ‘Health and safety’).

As event manager, you must ensure that you adopt a structured and logical method of planning and managing for every aspect of the event arrangements, in order to deliver a successful and enjoyable event. If you are happy that your qualifications and experience enable you to handle the dozens of things that need to be arranged, read on and start planning now.

If you are on your first read-through of this book and have little or no planning experience or possibly want a different view on how to go about it, you may wish to invest an hour in reading and understanding the project management supplement (see Annex A) at this point. It consists of a simple project management methodology that lends itself to the controlled management of multiple tasks in order to achieve a single goal, within denned costs, timescales and quality. After reading it you should return to this page.

Contacts with other people

As part of your investigation and planning, you will need to contact local authorities to confirm requirements, permissions and licensing for your event. You will also almost certainly need to seek advice from the local emergency services regarding any specific hazards there may be.

You may also have to seek advice from the health and safety executive to ensure that you meet their safety requirements, and depending on your event type and content, you may have to seek approval or advice from certain sports governing bodies.

During this process you will therefore be making a lot of contacts. You will benefit from an administrative procedure that formalises that contact. I suggest that the administrative procedure has two elements.

Contact details

This is a simple list of contact details, including name, number, address, email address, function/title, organisation and purpose (i.e. Council Environmental Health or Police Events Liaison Officer). I usually try to keep this list in a spreadsheet format, simply because it is so easy to update, print, sort and search the contacts.

Manchester Slug Breeders Society – Annual Show

Contact history

This section is more of a diary, in which I list the people I contacted and why, then move ahead to make a note of when a reply will be overdue. For example I might ask a tent supplier for a quote. My diary entry for that day might read: (Monday 13th June) ‘Contacted ABC Tents (New York). Spoke to Mark Quay. He will send written quote.’

When I have finished making my entry for Monday 13th June I will turn ahead to the page for Monday 20th June and insert a reminder for example: ‘Written quote from ABC tents should have arrived by now.’ This insignificant record takes just a moment to make, but will be a valuable reminder to me. I will be prompted to think about Mark Quay, and will know if he has still not sent the promised quote – and, maybe if that is indicative of their efficiency and reliability, I don’t want to do business with them’