So you have a club, you have members, you’ve raised money and now you are interested in hosting some events to show case your club and create content for interested people. So lets me give you some advice and help you get started.

Based on my experiences in event planning I highly recommend creating a mission statement and jotting down goals you want accomplished by hosting this event. Additionally you should write down the 5 W’s (Why, Who, When, Where, What/How) and use them as guidelines as you plan and carry out your event.

Why: What is the purpose? Is it going to be fun? Competitive? Informational? All of the above and more? What is the end goal?

Who: What does our audience want? Who is this event for? What are our audience’s goal? Is it different than our goal? How can we build an event that will be successful for our audience?

When: What part of the year will this be? What day/time? What else is going on during this time?

Where: What is the venue going to be? When thinking of this we need to consider the attendees, the availability of both the venue and our audience, any technological requirements (such as screens or bandwidth), concessions (food/drink), as well as transportation (how will people get to and from this event).

What/How: How will the event look like? This question is a bit interesting in that you will have to think of all the other questions here. You need to imagine the number of people that will be there, the kind of people that will be there, the amount of time and facilities you will be using, what you will be doing and how much everything will cost.

Lets jump into a case study now and see how this way of planning has worked out. In the case of my club, the ‘WWU League of Vikings’, a large event we regularly put on is a Viewing Party for the League of Legends World Championship Finals.

Starting with our mission statement: Our mission is to have fun with the game League of Legends. We believe passionately in having fun with all things League of Legends as a community. So we are hosting a Viewing Party that offers the opportunity for members in our community to come together and enjoy competitive League as a group.

Why: To bring members of our community together to enjoy professional League. It is competitive and fun in nature with an end goal of creating a closer knit community.

Who: We aim to attract all sorts of people who are interested in League of Legends, from veteran players to people who have just heard of League of Legends and who would be interested in coming. The goal of our audience is to be entertained and to maybe get some League swag we handout at events like these. We will build our event for our audience by creating an environment conducive to discussion, viewing via projector and by having food/drink and swag to hand out.

When: We will hold this event twice, once when the finals occur to have a live broadcast (normally at an ungodly time) as well as another when more people can make it. We can’t do anything about what else is going on but we can offer what we can.

Where: On-campus. Easy to reach via walking, bus or driving. Rooms available that can hold 200 people and if needed we can open up more rooms via Western’s room reservation program EMT. These rooms we are looking at have the necessary requirements; outlets for computers, good enough bandwidth in the form of ATUS provided wifi, screens via projector and are available to us for free.

How will it look like? We will have between 100 and 200 people in attendance in total with both viewings. Their skill level will be all over the place with people coming who have and have not been covering the competition. The event will last about 5 hours with the pre, post and actual game play. Concessions and swag will be offered for free as well as trivia cards to win prizes and entertain people.

With all this in mind we put things together. We get the venue, obtain the swag, get the trivia cards, buy concessions, and advertise our event via social media, email and posters. Before the event we will test the technical equipment we plan to use and track people who plan to come to get an estimate of all the things we will need. After the event we will get feedback from our audience, review our successes through our mission statement/goals/5 W’s and then use that to identify areas we can improve in for future events.