The previous issues of Sports News dealt with sports promotion. Now the focus will shift to special events.
Sports promotion and sports-related special events are very similar. If a distinction can be made between them, it would be in terms of primary funding: sports promotion has traditionally focused on consumer sales while special events has focused on corporate sponsorship.
Fairs, art shows, festivals, sporting events, and concerts are all examples of special events. Such activities have been around for a long time, but the concept of a special events industry is relatively new. What has changed is the realization on the part of corporations that these events are a good source of publicity and advertising and are worth sponsoring. Therefore there are now people who specialize in staging special events and others who specialize in matching events with sponsors.
According to Pam Derderian, CEO of Fifteen Minutes, Inc., a special events marketing firm in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, "Event marketing can be anything that draws your target audience together. Event marketing enables a company to increase awareness about its product or come face-to-face with potential and/or existing customers in a direct sales-oriented fashion." (1)
Although special events is a large industry (an estimated $13.5 billion spent on sponsorship worldwide in 1996), George Washington University is currently the only school offering a degree program. However, other schools address special events in their hotel and restaurant management or tourism programs. Still, the most common route to special events expertise is not through coursework, but on-the-job training.
If you are interested in special events, you are likely to pursue one of three career paths:
This issue of Sports News will focus on special events planning. The job involves finding a place to have an event, hiring people to set it up and operate it, ordering supplies, and so on. To be a successful event planner, you must know what you need, when you need it, and how much it will cost. The job requires a detail person: someone who can establish and stick to schedules, is willing to put in long hours, and does lots of behind-the-scenes work.
Consider what columnist Bob Greene had to say about MTV's Spring Break, an event with considerable corporate sponsorship: " it requires impressive discipline and split-second timing to product a telecast that seems so loose, unstructured and anarchic." (2)
Event planners can be full-time employees who work on just one event or they can be independent contractors who work on many different events. Independents can be compensated in a variety of ways: flat fees, hourly fees, or a percentage of the event's total costs. Compensation can also come from airline and hotel commissions and from what planners can save clients through negotiations with suppliers. Generally planners offer clients one-stop shopping, collecting money from them and then covering all expenses.
The best preparation for this career is to start with small-scale events. While you're in school, volunteer to be activities director. Plan a dance or a concert or a job fair. In addition, look for internships at event companies and, when possible, volunteer to help out at large events such as sports festivals and national competitions. Once you gain enough experience, you can land a job at an established company or start your own. Here are four examples of people involved in event planning:
In 1987, at the age of 26, Spalding started Wiersma Event Marketing with $500 and an office in her bedroom. By not talking a salary initially and working 80 hours a week, Spalding saw positive cash flow within six months. One of her first clients was the Gus Macker 3-on-3 basketball tournament.
Seven and a half years later her business generated nearly $1 million in annual income and employed a staff of eight full-time employees and four interns.
By 1995, Heise had six employees. Premier Sports earns its money through fees and a percentage of sponsorships and ticket sales. Says Heise, "We like to take a project from A to Z. Fortunately, because of the position I had with the Chiefs, I did make a lot of contacts not just in K.C., but across the country."(3)
Projects have included the rededication of the NCAA's Hall of Champions, the NFL's annual 101 Banquet, and the NFL traveling flag football tournament, Air-It-Out.
Their territory ran from Ogden, Utah to Memphis, Tennessee. They drove every inch of the route several times. Along the way, they met with leaders in cities and towns to plan local celebrations, marked off every place where the flame would be passed from one torchbearer to another, and determined where buses would stop to pick up relay participants.
Next he started managing triathlons and other sports events on a volunteer basis. In 1980 he was elected the director of Newport Beach's Human Race Triathlon, the oldest triathlon in America. He's still its director today. He didn't think about getting paid until the Lions Club offered him money to manage a running event. "I started realizing that more and more charitable organizations and universities were hosting 10K runs and golf tournaments that were supposed to be fund-raisers. But they weren't making money." (4)
In 1984 he began doing athletic and fitness consulting for International Management Group, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1988 he opened his own office there.
Still, event management remained a part-time endeavor for him. He owned and ran a chain of triathlon retail stores for several years (he sold them in 1988) and also taught economics and accounting at Chapman University in Orange, California for ten years (until 1995).
- In 1994, Caress merged his company with Pacific Sports Production, a sports-marketing company, and became its president. Pacific Sports has offices in Cleveland and Anaheim, California, employs 11 staff members, and annually grosses $2 million in sales. It has managed more than 150 sports events and currently serves as a consultant to 15 events around the country. It handles all details related to an event from T-shirts to marketing.
RESOURCES: An excellent resource for event production, management, and promotion professionals is the Advance Coordination Manual by Jan Moxley.
Moxley, an event tour and promotion manager specializing in advance coordination, has distilled what he has learned from his work on over 1,000 live event productions. The book is a comprehensive handbook that wastes no space on fluff. Everything is clearly presented through tight organization and the effective use of illustrations, checklists, and sample documents.
While the 404 page book sells for $209, it is a bargain when compared to other professional materials and training programs. In addition, the book comes with a CD-ROM containing hundreds of pages of usable documents (presented in both PC and Mac formats). If you are interested in the book, you can obtain more information by calling Zone Interactive Communications, 1-800-741-2920. Also there is detailed information about the book at www.zone-in.com/acm.html.
Copyright 1996 Suzanne Lainson/SportsTrust