What to settle
before you brief anyone.

A typical brief contains a date, a guest number, a venue preference, a budget and a tone. It is enough to get quotes. It is not enough to get a result, because it describes the thing being bought rather than the reason for buying it.

Five questions, answered honestly before anyone is briefed, change what gets proposed and usually what gets spent.

1. What has to be true by the end of it

Not what will happen — what will have changed. A supplier who knows that three specific relationships need to move forward will build a different evening from one who knows only that eighty people are coming for dinner. If this cannot be answered, the event probably has no objective, and that is worth discovering before committing a budget to it.

2. Who is actually in the room

Not the headcount. The composition. Whether people know each other, whether there is a hierarchy present, whether anyone is arriving alone, whether there are two groups who need to meet or one group who needs to settle. The answer changes the format before it changes anything else.

3. What has gone wrong before

Every organisation has a history with its own events, and most of it is undocumented. Somebody remembers the year the speeches ran forty minutes long, or the year the venue was too cold, or the year half the room left at eight. That history is the most useful information available and it is almost never included in a brief.

4. Who is making the decision

A brief that passes through four approvals arrives somewhere different from where it started. Establish early who signs, who advises, and who has an opinion that will be voiced late. The cost of discovering this at the proposal stage is low. The cost of discovering it the week before is not.

5. What the budget actually is

Withholding the budget is understandable and it rarely helps. A supplier who knows the real number designs to it. A supplier who does not will either propose something unaffordable, which wastes a round, or propose conservatively, which means you see a smaller idea than your money could have bought.

• What has to be true by the end of it
• Who is actually in the room, and what they are to each other
• What has gone wrong at previous events
• Who signs, who advises, and who comments late
• What the budget actually is

What this is worth

Answering these takes an hour. Not answering them usually costs a round of proposals, a renegotiation, and an event that does the job adequately rather than well.

It also changes who you end up working with. Anyone who responds to those five answers with a price list rather than a question has told you something useful.

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GD Events Group is a Sydney practice for the design of strategic experiences — corporate events, hosted environments and gifting, curated journeys and strategic experience programs. About the practice.