How To Manage Events
When it comes to organizing events such as conferences, corporate meetings, or even a wedding, there are a lot of moving parts. There will be people to communicate with, items to order, and deadlines to hit.
Highrise can help you manage the entire process, ensure that everything is organized in one place, and take a lot of stress out of the event planning process.
Step 1: Add users to your Highrise account
Anyone who is working as a part of your team to produce the event should be added as a user on your Highrise account. That will give them access to all of the collaboration tools and other information you will keep.
Only the Account Owner and admins can add new users to Highrise, and you can do so by navigating to Settings > Users
, and clicking Invite a new user
.
Step 2: Create contacts
Keep all of a contact's information (names, email address, physical addresses, and social media handles) on one page. You can even create any custom fields for specific data you need to keep.
These contacts could be vendors, sponsors, speakers, anyone you are working with to produce your event. You could even create contacts for event guests to keep up with attendee specifics and RSVPs.
You can create contacts in three ways:
- Forward any important emails you have in your inbox to your dropbox address. That will create a single contact of the person who sent you the email, plus will add that email to their contact page.
- Import contacts in bulk from a spreadsheet.
- Manually enter individual contacts by clicking on Add Contact at the top of your account.
Step 3: Organize information with Cases and Deals
Cases and Deals are two ways to organize information within Highrise:
- Cases give you a general way to organize information. If you're planning more than one event at a time, like two different conferences or meetings, setting up a Case for each event will keep information for each separate.
- Deals are tied to a monetary goal and are perfect for things like conference sponsorships and specific event bids.
You can connect contacts to both Cases and Deals, so you'll never have to hunt for the person you're working with on a specific portion of your event.
You can also add tasks to Cases or Deals, reminding you of deadlines and other time sensitive issues, such as when a vendor payment is due.
Step 4: Make good use of tasks
Events are completely driven by time and deadlines. Both event logistics and marketing and promotion have specific milestones and deadlines. And not only that, but who is responsible for what? All can be managed with tasks.
Tasks can be created from contact pages, individual emails, Cases, or Deals, and the task will be associated with that.
For example, do you have a sponsorship or vendor Deal that you need to follow up with? Create the task from that specific Deal page, and you'll be reminded of that.
Other tips
- If you have a shared email address (
info@yourcompany.com
) that is powered by Gmail, G Suite, or Office 365; you can set up autoforwarding and add it as a shared connection, to receive/send email right in Highrise. - Forward important emails to your dropbox address to give your team context on your conversations. You can also use commands when forwarding to make emails private or file emails to a Case or Deal.
- When you need to email more than 1 person the same message or communicate with larger groups, like speakers at a conference, do so easily with Broadcast bulk email.
- Need to send physical invitations? Tag your applicable contacts something like 'guest', filter and export your contacts to a spreadsheet, and use a 3rd party printing program for mailing labels.
- The mobile app is the perfect way to quickly search for a contact and make a phone call. No need to hunt for numbers or store "temporary" contacts in your phone.