Intro to Event Planning & Management (with Google Sheets)
About this video
Jeff argues an Apple Keynote and his birthday party share the same event-management structure — attendees, registration or invitation, agenda, and promotional materials — despite very different scale and budget. He identifies himself as a Product Marketing Manager at a large technology company who says he has planned and executed hundreds of offline and online events in the past five years, from small C-level roundtables in a single afternoon to 1,000-person webinar series lasting several months. The video previews his free Event Management 101 course on Skillshare — 11 lessons in total, with a downloadable Google Sheets template linked below — which walks through the spreadsheet he uses at work step-by-step. He splits the sheet into six color-coded sections using empty tabs as headers: overview, key information, pre-event, during event, post-event, and raw data. The overview tab should let someone with zero background understand the event without asking him. Key information contains four tabs he says answer 99% of senior stakeholder questions: RSVP snapshot for sign-ups, agenda for content progress, promotion channels for which channel drives sign-ups, and comms timeline for the next confirmation or reminder email. Pre-event, during-event, and post-event tabs organize tasks before, during, and after the event to reduce missed items. Raw data tabs, marked in gray, store registration, attendee, engagement, and post-event survey data. He says the video’s concepts suffice for planning a happy hour or team offsite, while professionals should take the full course.
Key takeaways
- Use the same pre / during / post event structure regardless of scale, from a birthday party to a keynote or a 1,000-person webinar series
- Structure the Google Sheet in six sections — overview, key information, pre-event, during event, post-event, and raw data — color-coded with empty tabs as section headers for quick finding and cross-team clarity
- Make the overview tab self-explanatory so someone with zero background understands the event without asking the organizer
- Consolidate senior stakeholder answers into four key-information tabs: RSVP snapshot, agenda, promotion channels, and comms timeline
- Keep raw data separate in gray tabs for registration, attendee, engagement, and post-event survey data; the full method is in his 11-lesson Skillshare Event Management 101 course with a copyable template
Episode details: published October 12, 2021 · 5:47 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Jeff Su’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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