Why Goal-Setting in Event Planning Matters

Before you start planning an event, it can make all the difference to know why you’re even doing it. Knowing this should be an outcome of the research phase of event planning, as it will help you go forward through every phase of the event.

Defining the purpose of your event begins with the following two questions:

• What specific challenge is the event directed at solving?

• What do you want to accomplish by having this event?

It’s tempting to make decisions based on feelings or tradition. You might say to yourself, “I feel like people aren’t happy, so maybe I should try doing it this way,” or maybe, “We’ve always held this event, so we just keep doing it.”

The issue is that you can end up investing a lot of time and resources into events, but if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll have a hard time making progress toward your mission as an organization.

People and organizations all have limits. We can only do so much. At some point, you will run out of resources—whether time, money, ideas or energy. Doing more events does not necessarily mean you’re doing a better job. So, how do you make sure what you do really counts?

What’s the Point? Defining the Purpose of Your Event

Clearly identifying the purpose of your event by defining your goals and objectives is an important step in fulfilling your purpose. To ensure you’re effectively using your resources and maintaining forward movement, every event you produce should back the mission of your church.

To begin setting your event goals and objectives, you will need to start with a clear organizational mission and goals. Having this information sets you up to develop events with goals that will help accomplish your organizational mission.

Take Church X, for example:

• Organizational Mission: Evangelism

• Organizational Goal: See attendance increase by 10% each year for the next five years.

Knowing its mission and goals, Church X might do a SWOT analysis and realize their greatest decline in church attendance is among twenty-year-old attendees. Knowing this data, they set the objective of seeing the number of twenty-year-olds involved increase by 20% within the next year. They do some research and realize that twenty-year-olds are disengaging because they don’t feel connected at church. This research is important because it identifies the specific problem to be solved.

In relation to event planning, the church decides to produce an event that is directed at solving the specific issue of a lack of connection among twenty-year-olds. They refine their target audience to twenty-year-olds who have been a part of church life within the last year and live within 15km of the church. Their goal is to foster connections and relationships among twenty-year-olds to support the connection and integration of twenty-year-olds within church life.

Working as a Team

In working with a multi-person team, it becomes even more important that your mission, goals and objectives are written down so that they are effectively and consistently communicated. If putting strategy into words isn’t a strength for you, find someone on your team or within your network who is.

Hitting the Mark with Objectives

Two questions to ask yourself after goal-setting are:

• Do these goals support the overall mission and goals of our organization?

• How will we know we solved the problems? By what indicators will we measure success?

A good way to measure success is by setting objectives. As always, in goal setting, objectives should be SMART. For those not familiar with the acronym, SMART stands for:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Relevant

• Timely

An example of SMART objectives for this event may be:

• That event attendance would be equal to 20% of the total average Sunday service attendance.

• That 15% of the attendees would attend a life group within four weeks after the event.

• That 5% of attendees would be involved in leadership at the next event.

Goals usually are large and don’t change from year to year. Objectives are different from goals in that they are specific and narrow, are used to achieve goals, and directly tie into evaluation. For annual or reoccurring events, I usually set objectives for each event, while the goals of the event may be reassessed every 3-5 years and should support your organizational mission, which typically goes unchanged.

Summary of Goal-Setting

In summary, taking the time to set goals and objectives for your ministry will help keep your events focused on the mission of the organization.

Having goals will help you:

• Keep focus when making event-related decisions. Giving away travel mugs might be a nice gesture, but does it really help accomplish your goal of building community? When you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, you can clearly make decisions that fuel your objectives.

• Ensure your events support the overall mission of your organization. When you define the purpose of your events, you get a greater view of the gaps that exist. It also helps ensure that you’re spending your resources in a targeted way and are creating forward motion and progress toward your mission as an organization.

• Evaluate your efforts to ensure they work. If you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish from the start, it becomes difficult to measure whether if what you did worked. Yes, after it’s done, you might get a good or bad feeling about how it went, but that isn’t always indicative of how others felt or what sort of education or information was implemented as a result of your efforts.

• Strategically channel and spend your resources. Who doesn’t want to save more time and money? When you know why you’re doing it, and you can measure your results to ensure that what you’re doing is working, you become more efficient and streamlined in your efforts.

Doing the research and clearly establishing goals and objectives that support the mission of your organization will go a long way in making your events successful. This gives you and your team a clear purpose and guideline by which to measure every decision you make leading up to the event.

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