Knowledge for Event Planning

Knowledge for Event Planning

It's chilling how little the average planner knows about anything technical. It's really not that planners need to understand how to operate a musical sound board, or install gear, create software or anything.

Event planners, "however, must know how to bridge the gap between the people who speak on stage or prepare presentations to be publicized, and the audio visual technicians who make that happen. The unfortunate item is that the event planners are the weak link in that chain," says Sandeep Kumar Aggarwal; CEO of SKA Management.

Sandeep Kumar Aggarwal Explains the Double Standard

Even more disappointing, is how little planners even care about this lack of knowledge. Event planners take great pride in almost every other aspect of event planning, including site variety, food and beverage, transportation, entertainment, decoration, logistics, risk management, sustainability - anything you name it.

Somehow it's perceived that it's acceptable to play dumb on audio visual. Aggarwal stresses that, "Event planners would be angry if the menu for their open bar had low grade Popov Vodka instead of Grey Goose or Kettle One, but they take it on blind faith that the microphones, projectors and lighting instruments on the AV proposals are appropriate for their event."

Again, this doesn't seem to bother them, because it's par for the course in the industry, and event planners know most other planners simply aren't expected to master this area either.

Sandeep Kumar Aggarwal Explains Just Exactly Why It Matters!

This stuff is all learnable, and it should be learned. Event Planners need to know what they're doing when it comes to technical production:
1. Fear of the event being ruined. There's a bunch of ways that any event can go wrong because the event planner didn't ask the right questions or communicate the proper information to the presenters or the vendors.
2. Legitimacy for clients. If your entire image is a middleman between the lighting, a/v or production vendor and the speakers, you might as refrain. Instead one should be providing the value-added information to the client and taking complete control of managing their entire event, especially including backstage dealings.

 For an instance, Any time an individual looks up at a screen at the event and see black bars above and below the slide content (or on the sides), that's the sign of an average planner. This simply means the individual responsible for planning the event never bothered to make sure that the aspect ratios of the visual content and the screen were in synch.

In Ending

Sandeep Kumar Aggarwal, is firm in believing that meetings and event business has made great strides in the past couple years in terms of general professionalism and quickly improved the knowledge standards. The consideration of how many events involve somebody speaking at a podium or some other element requiring lighting, sound or projection, it's high time event planer's knowledge in this area caught up to the rest and become a much higher standard.