Advanced event planning: 4 steps to control event costs

An activity is generally divided into four parts from beginning to end.

• Theme article: both to be discovered and to be spread
• Rewards: The key to motivating users to participate
• Rules make it easier for both parties to exchange
• Promotional articles are not about informing users, but about impressing them
• Cost: Four aspects of controlling activity costs
• Risks: Correctly understand risks and actively embrace them
• Data: Data analysis methodology that must be understood
• Implementation: The key to implementation lies in public human resources
• Review: The secret of accelerating team growth

In the eyes of outsiders, the cost of doing an event is the rewards given out during the event.

In the eyes of the beholder, the cost of doing an event is the reward plus the time and effort to develop the event.

In the eyes of operators , the cost of doing an activity is all the mental and physical effort expended from start to finish.

An activity is generally divided into four parts from beginning to end.

Any activity starts with the planning stage and is implemented in the subsequent execution stage (development, promotion, and operation). In order to achieve the initial operational goals, you have to pay too much. Operations is the initiator and others are collaborators. When problems arise, everyone will ask you what to do; when others encounter something they don’t want to do or cannot execute well, operations have to use human resources to fill the gap; when any problems arise, operations are the ones who clean up the mess.

From the beginning to the end of the activity, every link pays costs.

The planning stage tests the accumulated business experience of operations

Whether it is revenue generation or attracting new customers , it is often related to the company's annual plan and quarterly plan, and then broken down into monthly and weekly plans. All planning links are centered around the goals within a cycle.

In addition to cooperating with other departments to attract new users, the rest of the operations department thinks every day about how to maximize revenue with the existing number of users. In this area, operations is completely dominant and other departments collaborate.

For the cooperating departments, most of the time what they see are specific implementation plans . Behind each of these implementation plans, the person in charge and the team spent time together in meetings torturing, overturning, and abandoning them before eventually forming a practical implementation plan . During the execution process, continuous adjustments and iterations may be required due to various reasons.

Good event planning is always about choosing the most suitable one from countless options . An ambitious team will write about 1 useful piece of paper out of every 5, exchange information with people from 4 different departments to confirm the feasibility of a plan, and hold a 3-hour meeting to confirm the basic framework of the activity. For teams with no ambition, the intellectual resources they pay for can be extremely scarce, and they can just copy the pace of their competitors.

This process requires the operations manager to lead the team to use all intellectual and physical resources and rack their brains to try to achieve it.

The previous chapters mentioned [Theme Chapter], [Reward Chapter], and [Rules Chapter] are all considered as intellectual resources that need to be expended in the planning stage. There are so many issues to confirm in those three articles.

We assume that we have designed many good plans, but they may fail and be forced to downgrade due to the incompetence of the executors. There is no point in blaming others for their incompetence. Considering the execution level and the cost at each stage is the top priority in the planning stage.

Of course, with the accumulation of work experience, the growth of the team, and the judgment of the abilities of collaborative personnel, the intellectual resources expended in the planning stage can be continuously reduced.

The development phase tests the development and collaboration capabilities of operations

Different activities have different development costs. Some are simple and can be done by publishing an activity case, such as level-up competitions, logging into the game to receive gift packs, forum essay solicitations, etc. However, some of the more troublesome ones need to be developed, such as reservations and redemption of gift packages, wheel draws, sign-ups, registrations, guessing, etc. These activities all involve page functionality development and database storage. Of course, there are many activities that are directly built into the game.

Some operations managers will imitate product managers in writing requirement documents and communicate with artists, programmers, and testers across departments, while others will directly entrust the work to more professional students. Writing a requirement document that the development team can understand is definitely a professional job. It is not the end of the job after writing it. There is also the subsequent requirement review, interaction design, front-end and back-end development, operation and maintenance, and so on.

It is necessary for operations to master development knowledge. If we excitedly design a set of gameplay, and the development team says that it is difficult and risky to implement, then we will be forced to redesign the plan, which will invisibly waste time and costs.

If you can write documents, your communication with developers will be efficient. If you can't, you will have to supplement and improve the rules while developing. The cost of collaboration between departments is often much higher than you think.

A team with experience will try to template each functional module they develop to achieve reusability. For a development team, if they do something repeatedly (the professional term is reinventing the wheel), it is equivalent to standing still, doing hard labor, and having low development motivation.

Activity templates are like an arsenal, the accumulation of each team. Take lottery as an example. Random activities in the world can be divided into several types. Once they are templated, you only need to update the design and configure the table each time. The more things you have in your arsenal, the more tricks you can use.

The cost of this aspect will continue to decrease as skills improve and activity templates are built.

The publicity phase tests the publicity planning ability of the operator

The importance of publicity cannot be emphasized enough. It is an important dimension that directly affects the number of participants in an event and the scope of its impact. This area of ​​work also has a framework, which is introduced in detail in my previous chapter [Publicity].

Some activity promotion work, such as revenue-generating and active activities, is completed independently by the operator, including setting up promotion channels , designing promotional copy , and controlling the promotion rhythm.

The promotion and operation of some activities cannot be completed independently and require assistance from other departments.

Materials, copywriting, and advertising images are at the level of promotional content production, and are mainly output by designers.

Content distribution channels, exposure frequency, and marketing resource reservations are at the execution level, and this type of work is the collaborative work of the marketing and business departments.

For the promotion of super large events, the company will often assign the heads of marketing, business, brand, and public relations to cooperate with the operations team, while small events are handled by the operations staff themselves.

There is often some middle ground between super large events and small events, and many times help from others is needed. This is the stage that tests your planning ability and emotional intelligence. If you fail to make good arrangements and chaos occurs, it will repeatedly torture others, and no matter how high your emotional intelligence is, it will be useless. There are many links that require help from others. They could have left work on time. Do you have the ability to ask them to work overtime?

Here is a preview of the updated content [Implementation], which will be about how to effectively motivate public human resources.

The cost of this aspect will be reduced as the work process is continuously improved.

Operational stage, testing the operation and maintenance costs

1. Operating costs paid due to rule design

For example, essay writing, beauty pageants, and the ranking process will occupy our energy. There are also some competitive game activities that are conducted in rounds. After each round, the operators have to check the results, write battle reports, announce the qualified players, etc.

A seemingly insignificant question: starting at 0:00 and ending at 24:00, or starting at 12:00 and ending at 12:00 the next day, which one should we use?

My suggestion: The automatic settlement of rewards can be arbitrary. If human resources are required during the operation of the event , it is recommended to design it to end at 12 noon. Likewise, don’t design it to end at 18:00 before get off work ends on Friday.

Some activities require a longer settlement time. Colleagues who need data will go to get the data, and then accompany you to verify the results. Then you will announce the list of winners and settle the rewards. If you design it to end at 24:00, then they have to work overtime with you until 24:00, and then work together until 1:00. In fact, they are cursing you in their hearts. Why should they work overtime with you? On the other hand, we have to take care of our users and publish the list as soon as possible. If it ends at 24:00, you should publish the list in the early morning. If there is a problem with the settlement at this time, it will be very troublesome to make adjustments. No one is willing to come out to clean up the mess for you at night.

Similarly, do not try to launch some new activities that have never been done before and the processes are not smooth before the long holidays. If they are unstable and problems arise with the online activities during the long holidays, the entire coordinated team will not have a good holiday. (The 3,000-word blood and tears lesson hidden here is omitted...)

2. Due to the settlement method, the cost of awarding prizes

Rewards automatically settled by the system within the game are not included in this list. For page activities outside the game, some activity rewards are in the form of gift packages CD-KEY. For forum activities, you have to send a message within the site. For page activities, you need a mobile phone number and then ask colleagues on the platform to complete the CD-KEY sending via text message.

Some activities will carry some physical and cash rewards. In the process of collecting user addresses, you often collect all kinds of strange addresses, and then you have to check with users one by one (or ask customer service for assistance), otherwise you can't complete the mailing.

The settlement of cash rewards is definitely not as simple as transferring money through WeChat or Alipay. Companies usually go through the financial remittance and labor fee process and the internal approval process step by step. This requires collecting the user's bank card and asking the other party to fax a copy of their ID card, etc.

In the past, I had distributed 100 IP admini2s in a large-scale competition. The users who got the rewards were all wealthy users. I won't go into the process of counting and verifying the addresses. At that time, the new product was launched and the process of purchasing 100 units had been completed. Three wealthy users left messages on the CEO's Weibo, saying that they wanted to specify the color and hoped to pay extra money to upgrade the memory (from 16G to 32G). In order to satisfy the wealthy users and make promises one by one, the CEO directly interrupted the original procurement process and started all over again from finance to suppliers. In the end, for those three users, the other 97 users finally received the goods, a full month and a half later than expected.

Looking back now, this was a very stupid thing to do (for example, we purchased three designated machines for those users, but the purchasing rules and policy conditions at the time did not allow it, and the finance department was in charge of this, and the operation department could not change the policy). We have many ways to circumvent or solve this problem, but in the actual situation at the time , the information of various departments was not synchronized, the promises had to be fulfilled, the process was irreversible, etc., which led to this kind of thing happening . This is my personal experience, which is deeply impressed and helpless.

Everything seems very stupid in retrospect, but when it happened, it was indeed caused by a variety of reasons intertwined together, and we can only be wise after the event.

All maintenance costs depend on previous planning . If you leave enough time during the design of the activity, these are not a big deal, but the worst thing is the costs caused by accidents.

3. Maintenance costs caused by unexpected situations

Despite our careful inspections and serious tests, accidents are inevitable during activities. Whether they are caused by our own subjective factors or due to other reasons, they will be dealt with by the person in charge of the previous activity.

No matter how well your activity rules are written, there will always be some users raising questions. This is the norm. If the feedback exceeds a certain area, you will have to constantly supplement, iterate, and explain. There are also some users who don't even read the rules that are there, and come to ask us when they encounter problems during the participation. For this kind of situation, either the operation department acts as customer service to answer questions, or we make a FAQ in advance to train customer service staff and let them help answer questions. These things consume our time and energy.

If you encounter a developer with poor business capabilities, activities are prone to bugs and can only be temporarily maintained and revised. Some of them are not BUGs, such as slow access, browser incompatibility, resolution issues, no load balancing, inability to withstand concurrent pressure , and a series of experience problems...

If any link is not controlled well, it will cause uncontrollable risks. The biggest cost is never the monetary cost, but the human resource cost of making mistakes and the opportunity cost of time wasted to make up for the mistakes.

The reason why an accident is called an accident is that it is unpredictable. If you want to avoid these possible accidents, you can rely on experience. I will introduce them in detail in the [Risks] section later.

The above contents are all related to the various costs in the activities and aim to help everyone establish a cost ideology. At the end of the article, let’s discuss the methodology for improving efficiency and reducing costs in organizational operations.

Everyone wants to improve efficiency and reduce costs

Our daily time is divided into various tasks. When it comes to daily work, it is brainstorming in the meeting room, writing documents at the workstation, and communicating and collaborating in various occasions...

We all know that any discussion of quality without considering cost is irresponsible.

Almost every manager emphasizes efficiency. If one claims to be diligent but is actually lazy at work, it is just wishful thinking on the part of the manager. Everyone has the subjective desire to pursue efficiency, but the question is how to do it? Simply emphasizing guiding ideology is of no help to actual business operations.

Every practitioner who has worked for a certain number of years must have two frameworks in mind, one is the efficiency framework and the other is the business framework.

The efficiency framework refers to how much company resources are called upon/consumed every time something is done? How long did it take? What quality results are ultimately achieved? You always have to have some idea in your mind.

In the event scenario, quality (activity KPI) is there. The only way to reduce costs is to improve efficiency, that is, to use fewer human resources and deliver better results in a shorter time. Every manager who emphasizes efficiency should start from these three perspectives.

To put it simply, the business framework is the department's business operations manual.

Each department is responsible for its own business modules; each business module can be broken down into various links (like in this article); and each link can be broken down into various execution details. This splitting process is the process of building a business framework.

For this reason, when compiling a department manual, it is not only necessary to tell everyone what to do, but also to provide past experiences, common mistakes and solutions (which most people are unwilling and unable to complete) . This is a difficult task, but it will be very rewarding if done. It is also a necessary condition for a manager to become a hands-off boss , and it is also one's core competitiveness.

The performance framework and business framework are mutually causal and iterative. People with little experience do not have a business framework, but they can use the performance framework to think about problems when doing things. After accumulating work experience, they can gradually build a business framework. People who have a business framework in mind, and who have repeatedly verified it with the performance framework, will be confident in doing anything.

• The more sophisticated the business framework, the more efficient the business will be.
• The more detailed the business framework, the better it is at measuring how much resources are needed to achieve the goals.
• The more detailed the business framework is, the more we can see whether we and our departments are operating efficiently.

Back to the topic of the text - cost, refining the business framework as much as possible is the only solution to pursue efficiency and reduce costs.