Confessions of an Event Planner: Case Studies From the Real World of Events--How to Handle the Unexpected and How to Be a Master of Discretion (28 page)

Under the umbrella of event planning there are three very distinct areas and each is suited to a very specific personality type. One category is made up of corporate and business social event planners, another of personal party planners (wedding planners and all the festivities related to that, family or society celebrations like sweet 16s and bar and bat mitzvahs) and the third of nonprofit association planners who work in-house with the charity.

Corporate and business social event planners are skilled in event psychology, which requires the ability to strategically develop events that deliberately create and/or target specific responses and motivate their client’s attendees by tapping into people’s personal and professional dreams to bring their clients the return on their event investment (time, money and energy) they desire. There is a world of difference between “party planning” (weddings, birthday parties and other personal celebrations) and professional corporate and social results-driven “event planning,” which can still include seemingly personal celebrations—such as an awards ceremony or personal anniversary—but they come wrapped with a business agenda as does any gala fund-raiser to which a company lends their name and company image. Corporate and business social event planners are used to working with big budgets and dealing with one key decision-maker.

Party planners and wedding planners are working in an event planning arena that can require a lot of hand-holding and dealing with a multitude of emotions—not evoking them in the manner a corporate and business social event planner does, but rather calming them and the frayed nerves of multiple self-deemed decision-makers (think of a wedding: the bride, groom, mother of the bride, father of the bride, mother of the groom, father of the groom, maids of honor, best men, relatives on both sides, and well-meaning friends all clamor to be heard). Most corporate and social business event planners run for the hills when their family, friends or clients ask them to take on a personal party event. They don’t have the patience for hand-holding. That’s not what makes them tick. Instead, it’s meeting corporate business challenges creativity through custom events that fulfills them. They don’t want to hear 27 different options on which shade of buttercup yellow is the perfect shade. They want to only hear their own creative voice, knowing that what they choose will be the right one. They are not adept at handling what in their minds is time-wasting and money-wasting frou frou. They are results driven and business minded, while still wanting to produce meaningful, memorable, magical events but not wanting to deal with emotional decision-making and a limited budget. Corporate and business social event planners
can
work with limited funds but prefer not to deal with bridezillas whose demands far exceed money supply.

Nonprofit event planners deserve a medal. Their job requires them to handle elements of both and struggle to obtain sponsorship dollars and support when thousands of other charities are doing the same thing. Nonprofit planners, unlike professional corporate and business social event planners and party planners, don’t have an experienced team of staff and suppliers to help them pull off an event. And there’s no money to hire one. They are working with volunteers who may know absolutely nothing about timing, logistics and successful event execution and they don’t know what they don’t know. Then again, sometimes neither does the in-house nonprofit planner who may have just been thrust into that role. And at some events Dee Dee, Daniela and I witnessed, we saw volunteers that did not even honor their commitment to show up and fulfill their duties. At one event fewer than half the volunteers showed up to set up and run the nonprofit’s event. Remember, just like the PamperedPettyPartyPrincesses, volunteers can come with their own set of agendas, including meeting Mr. Right or gaining entrance into society circles. Not all of them are there because they are passionate about the cause.

Jumping in and working with them was a learning experience on both sides. After seeing the disastrous results of gala fund-raiser event left in PettyPartyPrincess hands and experiencing the chaos and confusion, we knew that the best way we could support charities was to contribute in other ways that would be of more value to us and to the charities and that wouldn’t leave Dee Dee, Daniela and me banging our heads on the table as we saw money walk out the door time and time again. We couldn’t risk our company name being tied to an event with less than stellar results, especially since we would have only handled a part of it and probably would have been called in only a day, a week or just several weeks before the event to try and save it from cancellation disaster and hefty cancellation charges. The only way we could take on another nonprofit event was if we brought in a corporate sponsor willing to underwrite the entire event—as a marketing tool for them around brand awareness of their company, to access to their target audience, to introduce a new product, as a public relations maneuver, or so that they’re viewed as a company who gives back—and do it in the polished and professional manner of how their corporate events are run. We kept saying that someone needs to write a book—and someone did write an entire best-selling series after experiencing what we did and seeing the same need—and tell PettyPartyPrincesses how to properly hold such a function. But unless it was wrapped in a fashion magazine, it was doubtful they’d ever read it.

“You just don’t understand,” said one Princess in a self-important tone. “It’s attitude.” It was attitude, all right, but not the kind she was talking about. “ChattyCattyCathy” went on to say that of course people (her people) would adhere to the code of high society etiquette, inferring that Dee Dee, Daniela and I knew nothing about such behavior, and that if their invitation reads from 6 to 10 they will leave promptly at 10 and the ones coming from 9 to 12 will not arrive early. Experience tells us that, high society or not, they were setting themselves up for major problems and risking having their gala fund-raising event closed down with television cameras rolling. When you take the gala opening of a new cutting-edge entertainment complex and invite families—not just couples—to attend and in the hopes of having maximum attendance set it up as a two-tier event with time overlap and no means of regulating who extended or came early, and combine that with free food, free drinks, top entertainment, high-energy bands, high-tech special effect indoor laser shows and a fireworks finale, no one’s leaving until the very end.

This is very different from doing a day event followed by an evening event with the venue closing down at the end, the facilities being refreshed and then reopening. There you have some semblance of controlling guest count numbers and adhering to fire marshal regulations. And you should have heard the gasps when we told them that porta potties—yes, we found luxury ones—would have to be set up in an area out of sight in order to get the go-ahead for the doors to be open based on the invited numbers.

Thankfully we were just sharing our expertise, not taking on or tackling this fund-raising event, and came in at the beginning to give them a heads up. In support of the charity, we did purchase tickets to the gala event and exactly as predicted “attitude” meant zip when it came to parents leaving at their appointed time when they had their children begging to stay and knew there was no way someone could tell if they were on the early or late invitee list. As all of us left at the “correct” time, we encountered Chatty CattyCathy out front begging the fire department—in not so nice tones—not to close their event down and not to walk through the building (which of course they did). The volunteer minions were trying to calm down a huge line of parents and their very unhappy children waiting to get into the venue and were racing to and fro trying to appease them by bringing out food and soft drinks. The press on hand were getting wonderful candid shots of a foot-stomping PettyPartyPrincess losing total control of herself and her event as the men in uniform marched through the building and worked to bring numbers down before shutting down the gala. A much different grand finale than had been planned.

A knowing attitude is very different than knowing attitudes—which we did. Dee Dee and Daniela made sure to stop by and pay their respects just when ChattyCattyCathy was turning different shades of red, which really did not go with her dress, as Daniela deliberately stage-whispered just a teeny tiny bit cattily to Dee Dee.

The event that was triggered by a frantic telephone call was one where major celebrities were attending and tickets had been sold out, but not one bit of work had been done on the actual event because none of the ladies-in-waiting had been able to make the meetings or time for this event and they were now in the middle of prime personal entertaining season and family getaways to second and third homes. Even though the event had been planned for months, the two PettyPartyPrincess co-chairs were so at each other’s throats and busy sabotaging one another—and trying to best each other in who could pull in the highest social ranking celebrities and guests—that actual event operations had gone unnoticed and undone until two weeks before the event was to take place. Now they were in full panic mode and rightly so.

We took a look at the venue and what had to be done. It’s one thing to pull off an event for 2,000 in under six weeks with professional help and a budget to pay for what needed to be done, but it’s an entirely different matter to try and take something high profile on and do it with no dollars, no expert supplier and no program director help. Because of the nature of the event—a celebration of someone’s lifetime of achievements—we jumped in and enlisted an army of event planning industry friends to save this event for the award recipient (who was greatly beloved by the world and had no clue what was going on or in this case not going on). We certainly didn’t do it to save the PettyPartyPrincesses’ faces or fates should the press who were coming out in droves catch wind of what had been left undone. While the two PettyPartyPrincesses battled it out for control as to who would sit next to the top guest of honor, etc., everyone worked around the clock for two weeks straight to pull this off. It was touch and go right down to the wire, with everyone doing it on their own end as a labor of love or respect for the guest’s talents and contributions to the world.

We met attitude again in suggesting that one of the PettyPartyPrincess chairs not try and arrive at the event with the celebrated guest but rather be on hand to welcome her guests and entertain the press while they were waiting, but nothing would deter her from making a grand entrance with the VIP. It would be a great photo op and all that, stepping out of the limo with them clearly showing that they were BFFs. She was hell-bent on stealing the limelight and following PettyPartyPrincess rule #1—It is
always
all about ME—to the max. For her, that night was about showing the guest, the press and the public at large that she, not her co-chair, was the reigning PettyPartyPrincess.

Sigh ... we tried to tell her. The newspapers the next day and television entertainment news clips showed Dee Dee proudly welcoming the guest as they stepped out of the limousine and the press surrounding them with flashbulbs going off and everyone asking for sound bites. And when the wannabe QueenPettyPartyPrincess dramatically stepped out of the limousine to grace everyone with her presence not a soul was left around, as everyone had followed the star of the evening in with her co-chair, linking arms with them and appearing not to ever consider letting go. The co-chair had also managed to be the center of attention, entertaining the press while they waited for the limousine to arrive. And it would have been her, not Dee Dee, who actually would have been the one to greet the guest had she not been pulled away to be interviewed by a news station live. Then again, it would have been the wannabe QueenPettyPartyPrincess doing the grand deed—being part of the live television interview—if she had been ready when the limousine and VIP guests arrived to pick her up. They had set off without her knowing how important timing was, but returned to pick her up when she threw an incredible tantrum when she discovered they were no longer waiting. She was adamant that she arrive in the limo with the celebrity guest. Have to admit that after all we had been put through, seeing wannabe QueenPettyPartyPrincess’s face when she stepped out of the limousine, and there was no one, to pose for was priceless.

You would have thought we’d learned our lesson by now, but nope. It’s hard for those in the industry who take event orchestration very seriously not to step in and try and do something if they see an event about to go off track. We still did what we could when we could but at a distance.

We jumped in the day before an event to try and track down over 1,000 martini glasses for a fund-raising event that advertised a martini bar. No one had remembered to check if the venue they were holding the event at actually had them on hand. Nope. Had to be rented at a cost in the thousands and paid for by the nonprofit organization.

Another time we found a restaurant willing to lend a gala event bottled water when the donated shipment got tied up in customs and would not make it on time and of course it was a brand not easily found. This was high-society palates, after all, that we were saving from being parched and ordinary tap water would not do, and if water was purchased it would come off of the charity’s bottom line.

We even ended up doing bussing and dish-washing duty at one fund-raising event that featured gourmet food tasting—one that we were paid guests at—when it turned out that volunteers did not show and it appeared the expected number of guests was more than the restaurants had dishes, glasses and cutlery for. With each sampling guests were laying down their dirty plates and heading off in search of fresh ones. Matters were made worse when one restaurant decided to use the wine glasses on hand for their desserts, and so there we were dealing with patrons’ parched throats again. The dishwasher in the venue was slow; no one had tested or timed it and they had not hired staff to bus, load, unload or replace, counting on volunteers to take on that duty. No wonder the volunteers didn’t show when they were given their assignments. And major upsets occurred in the cloakroom when the volunteers that had checked in the coats checked out and left.