Helpful Trello Tips For Event Planners

Without the right tools, planning an event can be quite stressful. At any given time, there’s a list of things that need to be done, and the deadlines always seem tight. If you want to organize your work better, be more efficient, save time, and deliver wildly successful events, add Trello to your suite of tools. Trello is an amazing project management application that can help you take care of every detail of your event seamlessly. Millions of users love Trello because of its strong visual interface, ease-of-use, and great collaboration features. 

Whether you specialize in planning weddings, birthday parties, concerts, festivals, sporting events, corporate events, or charity events, Trello can be your ultimate planning tool. You can use it to smoothly organize your event’s to-do tasks, notes, contacts, and documents in one place. When combined with other applications, Trello can do so much more. If you would like to gather more insights from your Trello board, combine it with an advanced tool like Bridge24 for Trello.

Why Spreadsheets Aren’t Ideal for Event Planning

Although there are a plethora of event planning tools, many planners still rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage their work. Yet, spreadsheets have many limitations. Below are some of them.

• They don’t allow event planners to track their workflow and stay focused on the bigger picture. 
• Spreadsheets don’t provide live updates to shared users when something happens on the spreadsheet. 
• Excel sheets can’t be connected to other event planning integration tools to improve their capabilities.
• Spreadsheets don’t support in-app communication with team members.

Tips for Setting Up a Streamlined Event Planning Board on Trello

To get the best out of Trello when using it to plan your events, follow the tips below.

1. Split Your Event Into Phases

Delivering a successful and memorable event is no small task. There are lots of people to coordinate with and plenty of things that need to be done. To have a clear picture of your workload, assign responsibilities to your staff, manage every detail effectively, and break down your event into several segments. 

Open Trello, set up a new board for the event, and then create a list for every phase of the project. Your lists can be named, ‘Pre-Event,’ ‘During Event,’ and ‘Post Event.’ On the right side of each phase, you should have a list named ‘Completed.’ Move all completed to-do tasks within a phase to its adjacent ‘complete’ list. 

2. Invite Team Members to the Trello Board

Meetings not only consume time, but they also distract teams from doing what needs to be done. Instead of setting up live meetings to discuss the event’s issues, you can simply invite your staff members to the Trello board and ask them to add cards to the lists you have created.

In the ‘Pre-Event’ list, team members can add cards like ‘Build Event Website,’ ‘Create ad Campaign,’ ‘Activate Networking Community,’ and ‘Find Event Volunteers.’ You can further break down the project phases into mini-projects. To do this, create a checklist of things that need to be done in each card. For example, in the ‘Find Event Volunteers’ card, make a checklist of items like, ‘Write Blog Post to Advertise Vacant Volunteer Positions,’ and ‘Post on Social Media to Promote Volunteer Opening.’

To track the progress of work at a glance, inform every team member to add a due date and label to each card they create. Also, remember to attach images to cards where appropriate. If you want to follow up on some specific event venues later, you can add their pictures to remind you how they looked.

3. Consider Using Trello Throughout Your Event

Even with a feature-rich tool at your disposal, you can’t get the best out of it if you don’t use it extensively. To learn whether Trello is an excellent fit for you and your team, adopt and commit to working with Trello for the entire lifecycle of one or two events. One way Trello can enhance collaboration and communication in event planning is with its in-platform messaging features.

 Instead of sending emails to employees every time you want to communicate an idea or clarify something, you can just open a card and send a message. Team members will receive an email notification, and when they open the card, they can see the conversation and comment.

Conclusion

If you’ve been having a hard time juggling clients, beating deadlines, remembering what needs to be done, or even communicating with team members when organizing your events, it’s time to add Trello to your productivity tools list. Trello helps you collaborate better, work faster, and deliver fantastic events. Combine it with advanced tools like Bridge24 for Trello to create interactive predefined reports and easily export Trello cards to Excel and CSV in high-quality printable formats that you can analyze to improve your event planning process.