How to plan a community event with no experience?

Based on the author's thoughts and ideas from project practice at work and combined with practical cases, this article shares the relevant steps and key issues in planning an operational activity, hoping to inspire you.

Recently, whether on Weibo or Zhihu, I can see many people wanting to switch careers to operations, and some who have just entered the industry feel confused about operations. So today I will share from the perspective of a newcomer to operations, hoping to bring different gains to everyone.

This article is only suitable for new operators who have not entered the industry or have just entered the industry. Experienced operators should read it with caution.

I have read many operation articles on the market. I think the following points are different from other operation articles:

1. Practicality: presents the most realistic business scenarios
2. 3. Easy to learn: You will understand it after reading it and can imitate the operation

After more than half a year of practice, I have a simple concept of operations. The work of operations is actually to perform a series of guiding actions based on a goal. The characteristics of this action are process-based, refined, and with a sense of rhythm.

To put it bluntly, based on a business goal, the operator must continuously break down the goal, and continue to break it down according to the goal of the breakdown until it can no longer be broken down, and then execute and implement it upwards along the bottom-level breakdown goal. In order to give you a better sense of immersion and practicality, I will explain below using an operational case I planned before.

1. How to plan an operational activity?

Planning an event generally includes the following five contents: activity purpose, activity nodes, activity warm-up, activity materials, and activity reminders.

1. Purpose of the activity

The purpose of the event is crucial and is the core of the entire event. Everything you do has its own purpose. Different purposes will lead to different behaviors, so you must take the time to think carefully about what the purpose of the activity is, is it to attract new customers, promote activation, or conversion?

Popular Science: In operations, we often talk about “attracting new customers, promoting activation, retention and conversion”. What does it mean? I will explain this with scenarios from real life, such as ordering takeout.

• Attracting new users: It means attracting new users. We often see that a 20 yuan red packet will be given for inviting a new user. This is actually an activity to attract new users. In order to get this 20 yuan red packet, people will radiate to people around them who have not registered yet. Successfully registering one person is considered attracting a new user.
• Promote activation and retention: To retain new users, you need to have other operational means to keep them, otherwise they may register today and leave tomorrow and never come back. Therefore, operations must do their best to get users to use the product, make them aware of the product's value, and thus encourage them to consume or achieve other goals you desire. For example, red envelopes and holiday promotions in takeout are all designed to keep users using the service.
• Conversion: The above two steps are preparations for this step. Only when you place an order for takeout, the purposes of the previous two steps are achieved. Enterprises still focus on profitability, so the so-called operational positions, and those that carry growth and conversion indicators have higher salaries.

2. Active Node

This is determined based on the time when the activity is launched. For example, if an activity is to be launched in 7 days, the deadline will be set 7 days later, and then a reasonable time schedule will be planned. Below is the schedule of an event I planned before. It was an online live class, which was mainly aimed at retaining users with the purpose of promoting activation.

• 509 Warm-up (WeChat text or poster)
• 510 Release materials to various channels
• 511 512 Weekend
• 513 Event Reminder
• 514 Event Starts
• 515 event article published

…

In this activity arrangement, the warm-up time starts from and ends with the release of the activity article. We will prepare in advance according to this node.

3. Activity warm-up

Depending on the size of the event, the intensity of our preheating and publicity is also different. Regular events are generally preheated 3 days in advance, and important events are preheated at least a week or even a month in advance. Here I would like to clarify a small misunderstanding. You don’t have to wait until everything is ready before you can preheat. You just need to complete the corresponding preparations at the corresponding time nodes. Regarding preheating, we need to think about: in what form should we preheat? Where to preheat? Do you want to organize any activities?

Format: H5? poster? article? Where: Official account? Circle of friends? Community? Organize activities: forward to the group? Are there any requirements for the group? Get rewards for forwarding to your friends circle? What reward?

How can we make decisions quickly in the face of so many problems? The answer is to think about what our purpose is? The purpose is to promote vitality. Because we are a community-based event:

In terms of form: we decided to present it in the form of a poster. Posters are short, fast and light to produce, and are a very mainstream way of playing in the community. Where: Since time is tight, I will focus on friends circle and community. If I don’t add many friends, I will mainly operate within the community. Organizing activities: This is the first time we have conducted course activities, so we have not set up any reward activities yet, just using copywriting to induce forwarding.

Activities will be set up in the next few issues, but that is a story for another time, which will be discussed in the next article. This article mainly talks about the ideas of the early planning.

4. Release channel materials

The preparation of materials should be arranged according to the activity nodes, and the entire activity process should be connected in the brain in advance. Because the materials are mainly for users, we take users as the starting point to think about what materials to prepare. Let's review the activity nodes:

• 509 Warm-up (WeChat text or poster)
• 510 Release materials to various channels
• 511 512 Weekend
• 513 Event Reminder
• 514 Event Starts
• 515 event article published

…

The first step to reach users is preheating. We have just determined that the preheating method is mainly to use posters to promote in the circle of friends and communities. The materials here are posters + supporting copywriting. In fact, we exposed positive feedback before the preheating. The exposed cases focused on the effects of short-term use to stimulate users' desire to use. It was a small preparation made in advance for the launch of the live class. Therefore, one of the characteristics of the operation is process-based.

There is a prerequisite for doing this: that is, users have already established awareness of your product. If users have not yet established awareness, you need to establish awareness first and then stimulate their interest.

The material is a poster + supporting copy, so let’s break it down further:

Poster: First of all, you need to think about what to write on the poster?

Because it is a live course, the essential information includes three main contents: course, lecturer, and how to listen.

Course: Contains the course topic and course introduction Instructor: Contains the instructor's photo and instructor introduction How to listen: When can I listen? Where to listen?

Because our users generally have time in the evening, the live broadcast is scheduled for 7-8 p.m., excluding the busy Mondays and Fridays, and the live broadcast time is set on the weekday Wednesday. When it comes to live streaming, there must be a live streaming platform. In order to reduce the user's learning cost, we compared several mainstream live streaming platforms on the market. The requirements for the platform are that it must meet the predicted number of viewers, be "fool-proof" operation, and have low learning costs. Finally, I chose a platform based on these three requirements.

Live course operation posters usually come with a QR code. This QR code can be personal, community, or a QR code for live broadcast link conversion.

Because there are many community-based operations, it is necessary to add friends for regular maintenance, so a personal QR code is placed. Below is the course promotion of 3 lessons of data analysis for your reference.

Cooperating copywriting: The key is to stimulate user interest in participation, so how to stimulate it?

Put out the bait. The bait can be that the instructor has an impressive background, the course has been polished for a long enough time, users who have heard it before say it is good, and it can help users quickly solve certain problems, etc. The bait is designed based on your understanding of the user. During the warm-up process, try to approach it from different angles to see how to write the copy that is more appealing, what users prefer to read, and optimize the copy and process bit by bit.

Here is a photo of an operator’s circle of friends. It is recommended that new operators add the operation accounts of high-quality companies in the industry, imitate, observe and learn.

5. Event reminders

This reminder will generally be given in three time periods: 3 days in advance, 1 day in advance, and 1-2 hours in advance. Reminders are usually sent through social networks and Moments, and some users may send private messages.

Warm up the event one hour before the live broadcast, confirm the time, equipment, live broadcast materials with the instructor in advance to ensure that the event can proceed normally. If you have time, you can prepare a Plan B to ensure that everything goes well.

2. How should the activity be implemented?

1. Activity warm-up

Because our live broadcast is scheduled for 514, which is next Tuesday, excluding the weekend, there are actually only 3 days left for warm-up. So for the warm-up period, I decided to do it once on Thursday, once on Friday, and at least twice on next Monday.

Warm-up on Thursday: For the first warm-up, when users are faced with such a sudden live course, for the first time, we must set enough value points to attract them. Because time was short and the design time was tight, if you have enough time, it is recommended to reserve a week in advance for warm-up.

Friday warm-up: Based on the first warm-up on Thursday, some more pain points/itch points of users are added for stimulation. For any operational activity, we can package the operation from different angles. Because the user base is so large, in addition to common characteristics, there are also personalized needs, and everyone's pain points are different, so it is necessary to try to operate from different angles, package different value points, and stimulate different user groups.

For example, in this live class, I can package the instructor’s impressive background, take screenshots and share previous students’ evaluations, and talk about the value of the course and the rich experience of the course development team. However, you should pay attention to the rhythm when operating, and not make it too frequent, otherwise it will easily be blocked by users who are not interested in the activity.

When I first started to switch to operations, I added a lot of users on my personal WeChat. Later, after I applied for an operations WeChat, in order to better operate and manage users, my first task was to direct users from my personal account to the operations account.

I have tried issuing public statements, running live classes, activating community daily reports, and even giving away solar term wallpapers for likes, all of which have brought unexpected results. The conversion data that I originally expected to be high was not high, but the results that I didn't expect were quite good. From event design to implementation, the cycle is short and the response is fast, and we can quickly receive instant feedback from users. This is also the charm of operations.

In the matter of WeChat account diversion, different means are used to stimulate users at different times, which is packaging operation from different angles.

Warm-up next Monday: The target users have already been mobilized in advance. As the live broadcast approaches, the most important thing is to remind users not to forget the live class and reserve time for listening to the class.

2. Before the live broadcast begins

One hour, half an hour and ten minutes before the live broadcast are all critical moments. We must ensure that the equipment, lighting, network, live lecturers, live broadcast rooms, etc. are all functioning normally to avoid emergencies.

If it is a live broadcast, be sure to be careful to avoid live broadcast accidents. Is the lecturer in place? Are all the equipments complete? Is the live broadcast room quiet and free of noise? Is the PPT ready? Is the file format compatible with the platform? Wait, make sure everything is normal before live broadcast.

• 1 hour before the live broadcast: At this time, it is just a simple reminder to users that the live broadcast will start in 1 hour. The copy can say #live broadcast countdown 1 hour#, and then take a photo of the live broadcast preparation or share the live broadcast link. In short, this will create an atmosphere for the official live broadcast.
• Half an hour before the live broadcast: Based on the previous point, let’s share things related to the live broadcast from a different perspective. For example, you can shoot a short video of a busy lecturer, or share the highlights of a lecture, to offer bait and attract hesitant users.
• 10 minutes before the live broadcast: Generally, some users have already entered the live broadcast room. This is the time to liven up the atmosphere and inform users of precautions for the live broadcast. Similar words like “The live broadcast will start in 10 minutes!” and “Questions in the comment section will be answered after the live broadcast” etc., and users who follow up will leave messages and interact to create a good live broadcast environment.

3. Live broadcast starts

If your live broadcast room supports user messages , then during the live broadcast, at least one person should pay attention to the comments section. One is to interact or solve user questions, and the other is to check whether there are any negative comments that need to be strictly controlled. In addition to users in the live broadcast room, we can also post the exciting content or comments of the live broadcast to the community outside the live broadcast room to attract more users to listen.

4. After the live broadcast starts

After the live broadcast officially ends, you can prepare a brief summary. Use every dimension you can think of to figure out which form can better impress your users.

If the number of listeners is large, you can write about the data, such as xx people listened to the live broadcast. If the data is average, you can write about the results or stories, such as someone listened to the live broadcast and took 10 pages of notes. You can also write about the time: from the generation of the idea to the implementation, the team of 6 people spent a total of 2 months planning and preparing...

The above are the things I need to prepare in advance for the implementation of social live broadcast activities. Combining with the previous article, don’t you think that operation is not that difficult?

Author: Tomato

Source: Tomato