As I’m working on getting documents together for the Intel event in NYC that I talked about in my last blog post, I’m understanding more about planning media events.

If you’re planning an event, you have to go into it with a goal of accomplishing something more than just throwing a “sweet party.” Otherwise, you’re spending what is likely to be a lot of money, and you come out of it thinking, “now what?”

When I first started at Intel, I was told about all sorts of events that were being thrown by either the marketing, PR team, or both.  At first, I didn’t look at this from a PR perspective. I just thought about the cool events I was going to attend and the networking I was going to do. A few weeks into my job though, I started to realize that each and every event had a distinct purpose – a cohesive message that was being cultivated. The goal of the events, as far as media goes, was to get the carefully developed messages into the press. (If you’re in PR and you’re reading this, this is probably where you’re going… “duhhh!”) And the people I work with are great at doing this because they’re informed about the company and its products, strategic in their planning, and very well organized.

I guess my key takeaway from helping with planning and attending these events is that successful PR events have a purpose. It’s easy to jump right into tactics (throwing an event is a tactic) because tactics are the fun parts of PR where you get to be creative. But every tactic, especially a major one like throwing events, needs to have strategies and objectives behind it. So, this is my advice to other PR practioners.

Before planning an event for your client or company or whoever, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is the ultimate goal of your client?
2. Is throwing an event going to help you accomplish that goal?
3. What do you have to incorporate into your event planning to help you accomplish the goal?
4. What are the key messages you want people to take away from your event?
5. How are you going to make sure they take those messages away (without beating them over the head with them)?