How To Recover From an Unsuccessful Event

So your event was a flop. It didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to, and now you’re feeling down. We feel you. More event organizers have been there than they would like to admit. What matters most is how you bounce back from it. And that’s what we’re going to cover in this article.

Change Your Mindset – View It As a Lesson

It’s very easy to slip into a state of mild depression after your event flops. However, you should always view it as a lesson instead of a failure. All successful people you have ever heard about have started from somewhere – most of the time from a failure. So view it as a lesson instead of a sign to give up.

Analyze What Went Wrong

Don’t think too much about the failure itself, but rather about what caused it. Gather your team and analyze the entire situation. Try to see both the small details and the big picture at the same time. Look for every nook and cranny and see what were the things that have led to a disastrous event. Hopefully, it wasn’t something so painful that fast event insurance couldn’t cover.

Take a Break

As humans, it can be hard to see one of your projects go down in flames. You’ll probably need some time to recover from an unsuccessful event, so it’s a good idea to simply take a break. Go away on a vacation for a week or two and stop thinking about it. When you feel ready, come back with fresh energy and a new outlook on what you should do.

Rethink Your Planning

Once you’ve gotten past the initial phase of the acceptance process, you’ll have a much clearer head and you’ll be able to once again plan things out accordingly. After you’ve analyzed everything that went wrong the first time and your entire team’s feedback (and attendee feedback if available), it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Reflect On What You Did Well

Out with the bad, in with the good. Just because your previous plan failed doesn’t mean that nothing good was in it. Take the good parts out of your old plan and insert them into your new one. Of course, you should be careful so that everything is aligned perfectly and makes sense to everyone on your team. Otherwise, you’ll just have a mishmash of ideas with no essence.

Was Your Competitor Slightlhy Responsible?

The event industry is huge, no matter what specific niche we’re talking about. There are numerous events that take place almost at the same time. With that said, are you sure your event didn’t fail because your attendees went to one of your competitors’ events that happened to take place during the same day or week? See if they had better offerings than you and then make sure to surpass them.

Pay Attention to Industry Trends

Maybe there was nothing particularly wrong with your event. Maybe the only major problem was the fact that you had it all figured out for the wrong year. Try and stay on top of industry trends. If you’re not up to date with everything that’s going on, you might miss out on a huge selling point for your event. And you’d be surprised how often events fail simply because they don’t have that “it” factor – no matter how many other things they got right.

Final Thoughts

We hope that these tips were useful. At the end of the day, all you need to remember is that a single failure isn’t the end. You can rise back up and take any new opportunity to improve yourself and become the next big thing.

Which of these lessons did you find more valuable than the rest? Leave us a comment below and get the discussion started. You’d be surprised by how much you can learn by interacting with our community.