How to operate an event well? 7 things to pay attention to

For a novice operator , how can you do a good job in event operation ? Today I will share with you mainly from the following 7 aspects.

1. Determine the activity objectives

If the goal of the activity is not clear, the operation will be blind, and finally you will fall into a state of doing activities just for the sake of doing them. How to clarify the activity objectives? First, determine the general purpose; corresponding to different activity objectives, they can be broken down into specific activity indicators.

How to break down activity indicators? Taking increasing the number of paying users as an example, the calculation can be done as follows:

Number of paying users = DAU (daily active users) × payment conversion rate

If we want to increase the number of paying users, we can start from these two directions:

1. The paid conversion rate remains unchanged, and the product DAU is increased;
2. The product DAU remains unchanged, and the payment conversion rate is improved.

Different approaches are adopted for different user types, and different promotion methods are adopted in the subsequent promotion process. In other words, when you propose the indicator of the number of paying users, you need to break it down into: do you want to increase the number of new paying users or the number of old paying users? Different user types require different activity methods and plans.

If you want to increase revenue, where does the revenue data come from? Let’s look at this calculation formula:

Revenue = Number of paying users × AR PU = (DAU × payment conversion rate) × ARPU

Therefore, to increase revenue, you can increase the ARPU value or the number of paying users.

If you adopt the former, you need to see whether the user group you are targeting is big R (high-consumption user group) or small R (low-consumption user group). Different consumer groups have different spending power, so different activity plans are adopted;

If your goal is to attract new users , your product plan needs to favor invitations and other related methods that can bring you new users. In terms of promotion, you may need to expand new channels and start from new channels.

Therefore, we must make the purpose of the event clear before it starts, and we must not do an event just for the sake of doing it.

Next, I will give you an example of an event I organized for YY’s 7th anniversary.

The event was held in July 2015. As the platform provider, our purpose in conducting this event was to increase platform activity and revitalize old users. We set this goal because at that time there was already a downward trend in traffic on the PC side, so we had to take some measures to retain our PC users.

For the business side, we need to leverage the advantages of the platform to distribute traffic and help each business achieve its KPIs and goals. As a platform, we have many business departments that work with us. We need to connect and communicate with them to clarify what their activity goals are.

In the end, a total of 12 businesses connected with us, covering various types of targets. These are the specific goals of the activity that we wrote based on the industry and company product background and business needs at the time.

2. Activity plan planning

After clarifying the event goals, enter event planning . I suggest that you refer to Mr. Xu Zhibin’s book “ Social Dividends”, which mentions six key rules for excellent activities: free, simple, interesting, transparent, accumulative and redeemable.

1. Free

Free means that the threshold of the activity must be lowered to zero, covering all user groups, including no need for users to pay, and the entire activity does not require any other additional conditions or requirements. The lower the participation threshold, the larger the population covered.

2. Simple

The gameplay of the activity must be simple and easy to understand, and the operation of the activity must be as simple and convenient as possible to reduce user operating costs.

When designing a plan, some students want to make it very complicated, thinking that the more complicated the activity plan is, the better it is. But don’t forget that the purpose of our event is to allow more users to participate and ultimately achieve the event goals. A plan that is too complicated is not conducive to user participation.

This requires every event designer and program planner to treat users as novices. There are many things we understand but users do not necessarily know them. Therefore, we need to think more about whether, as a novice user, this solution and operation are simple enough and whether we can minimize the user's thinking cost.

3. Fun

During the activity, the gameplay must be interesting and not boring to attract more users to participate. Users will spread the content spontaneously only when they find it fun, thus bringing in more users.

How did we make our YY7th anniversary event interesting? First, we combined the hot topic at the time: "The Voice of China", and used it as inspiration to make a small game called "Who Turns for Me?" The user guessing format is to guess which mentor will turn in each round. If the guess is correct, the user can get gold coins with a multiple of the bet amount; if the guess is wrong, the user will lose the bet coins.

Secondly, in guessing games, we make full use of the psychological characteristics of users: gambling games are generally very attractive to users, and users like to enjoy the pleasure in the process of gambling.

Furthermore, we borrowed from If You Are the One to create a "Light Up" segment. As mentioned earlier, only one mentor in the game will turn around. The lighting stage is equivalent to the arrival of an angel: all mentors will turn around. In this case, the user will win no matter which one they bet on. The explosion of lights is unpredictable and can create surprises for users.

As for the odds and the time period when the bet will go off, these are controllable in the background. For example, during peak operating hours, we can increase the odds, increase user participation, and increase the excitement of the gameplay.

In addition, based on the attributes of YY, a large group of people will gather in one channel. During the event, a situation will occur: many people will place bets and everyone will watch in the channel. This makes it easy for users to develop a competitive mentality when playing.

4. Transparency

During the event, it must be fair, open and just. Some activities have rewards based on different values. As long as there is profit, there will be some users who cheat and manipulate the rankings , so we also need to consider anti-brushing and anti-cheating solutions.

5. Accumulable

The accumulation of some benefits designed in the activity should be able to fully mobilize the enthusiasm of users, but this accumulation should have a certain upper limit, rather than being unlimited.

6. Cashable

Redemption is mainly an incentive for users' performance during the activity, and it should be issued in a timely manner. If it can slightly exceed users' expectations, the effect will be better.

In the design of redemption, we should pay attention to the universality and diversity of reward design. Universality means that all users can obtain benefits, and differentiation means giving greater benefits to the strong, thus stimulating users' desire for excitement and showing off.

3. Activity Resource Preparation

After the event is planned, you need to prepare relevant event resources, such as rewards and publicity resources.

For promotional resources, you need to reach the user groups you want to cover based on the activity goals.

Taking YY7th anniversary event as an example, our goal is to activate old users and provide more traffic for our business. Therefore, our publicity target is mainly aimed at all users of the YY platform or original old users.

After determining the user groups, we can list the available resources inside and outside the company according to the user groups, prepare in advance, and distribute them according to different user groups.

IV. Activity Risk Control and Alternative Plans

After the activity plan comes out, we need to estimate the possible risks and prepare plan B.

In addition to the risks of the activity plan itself, there is also the risk of delayed launch due to tight development and testing resources, the risk that the number of users participating in the activity will not meet expectations, and the risk that users will engage in ranking manipulation... How do we deal with these risks?

For example, if faced with a delay, how should we control the development progress? We can strictly control the time nodes, assign specific tasks to corresponding persons in charge, and send daily project progress reports via email to create a sense of urgency.

It is best for everyone to have a brief review with the developers regularly to see what problems currently exist. You may even have to consider whether there is too much demand? Can some non-core requirements be cut?

5. Monitoring feedback after the activity goes online

After the activity goes online, we need to observe the activity data at any time to see whether the expected goals have been achieved, whether there is any user feedback, etc., and make adjustments at any time based on what we observe.

Halfway through YY’s 7th anniversary event, we found that the completion numbers of different tasks varied greatly, and the total number of tasks completed did not meet expectations, so we quickly made adjustments.

• Improve task completion rate. The tasks originally arranged from easy to difficult are now arranged from low to high completion rates. This way, tasks with low completion rates are more likely to be noticed, thus increasing the completion rate.
• The rewards for completing tasks have been increased according to the difficulty , thus better motivating users;
• Reduce the total number of tasks and remove some simple tasks with high completion rates from the task list;
• Adjust some copywriting and logic to make it easier for users to accept and complete;
• Increase operational strength. After the adjustment, we analyzed the number of participants and the number of people who completed each task. After analysis, it was found that after adjustments, the gap between the number of people completing different tasks and the number of participants was gradually narrowing. The completion rates of some tasks that originally had very low completion rates were greatly improved after adjustments, while the number of people completing some simple tasks decreased, ensuring a balance in the number of people completing tasks.

Therefore, everyone must observe at all times during the activity and take corresponding measures.

6. Announcement of event results/prize distribution

People often ignore this step because at this point we have basically already gotten what we want from the user.

But this step is also very important. If the rewards promised to users cannot be fulfilled in time, it will affect the product's reputation and the loss will outweigh the gain. Therefore, after the event is over, rewards must be distributed as promised.

7. Activity Review

The distribution of prizes does not mean the event is over. The effectiveness of an activity, the problems encountered, and the attention paid must all be solved through review.

If you don’t review, you may repeat previous mistakes; even if you achieve your goal, you won’t know why and how to learn from it. Therefore, the purpose of reviewing is to let everyone know which experiences can be learned and which deficiencies need to be improved.

What is a review? How to review an activity? It mainly includes four aspects.

• Review your goals. When reviewing, be sure to review what the goals were at the time and whether they were clear and reasonable;
• Compare goals and activity results and analyze the relationship between them. What happened during the period of time when the data changed significantly during the process of achieving the goal? Associate the data with the corresponding events and analyze the causes;
• In-depth analysis. Based on the differences in goals and results, make bold assumptions and verify them carefully. For example, is a higher task completion rate related to the difficulty of the tasks and the order of arrangement? Once you have a hypothesis, verify it. Verification can be done through data; or by changing some variables, making small-scale adjustments or tests; or by user revisiting to understand the reasons from some typical users.
• Summary of experience. Try to discover the essence of the problem, find subsequent solutions, or settle some better demand points.

The above is an explanation of the entire activity. Next, I would like to give some suggestions to new operators:

• Operations work is very tedious and you may be constantly in a state of firefighting, so you must be careful, patient, and not afraid of trouble.
• In addition, various data may be encountered during the operation process, so there are relatively high requirements for the data analysis ability and data sensitivity of the operators.
• It is necessary to summarize and discover patterns from trivial work; or to refine and sort out the problems in current work or products from work and user feedback.
• Be good at thinking, be brave to try, and don't be afraid of trial and error. Boldly propose solutions and take the initiative to solve problems. Only after thinking about it, you can truly learn this knowledge.