An experienced event planner exactly knows how to deal with a stressed-out bridge, a touchy-feely uncle, or her domineering mother. But only if handling all these people was the only problem for an event manager. Event projects are extensively dependent on the arete of an event manager’s portfolio. A well-designed portfolio clearly explains who you’re and shows what type of work you do. Having an appealing event planning portfolio is a prime step toward getting more clients and a higher event budget.
Satisfying a client with a smaller budget but bigger dreams is even more challenging than handling a high-maintenance client. Whether you’re just starting out or already a pro in the event business, you will need a strong portfolio to showcase your command over the industry.
Portfolio Overview
Same as your other marketing plans, your portfolio should align with your company’s look and feel. It should exhibit the brand and purpose of your event business. When it comes to branding, you should be consistent whether it’s your website, social media, business cards, or other promoting material. Event planning portfolios should include a link to your website, a high-quality logo, a brand image, contact information, team bios, a tagline, an example timeline, a budget, certifications, and a catalog of rental items. Even after including all these elements, the portfolio should have a clean & classic design. In order to prove the credibility of your portfolio a few of the other factors that should be taken care of in the event business are shared below.
Website
To have a massive impact on your event planning portfolio you should have a sturdy website. The presence of your website directly helps to improve your customer count. The website will bring you clients, even after business hours. Placing your online presence with a website can make your image as a professional event planner. An attractive landing page, registration form, gallery & media, and your success story, each portion adds weightage to your event planning portfolio.
Awards & Certifications
You have invested your time, gained experience, secured certifications, served gracefully to numerous clients, and then had the chance of winning an award, why not share it then! The whole point of winning an award is to share it with others. Adding awards and certificates to your event planning portfolio will tell the world that you’re getting validation and recognition. Place these in the highlighted form to get more attention.
Reviews and Testimonials
In a world of fake journalism and influencer mistrust, consumers have no trust left in the sales business – which is why honest testimonials and reviews are very important. Testimonials are the stamp of approval. No new customer books any service without checking the reviews. Add the reviews either on the landing page or the other section where your clients can find them easily. Add some of the quoted lines of your client, videos, or photo highlights. Having testimonials on the website helps in building trust and credibility for your business. Ask them if they will write an online review or be a reference for your potential clients.
Gallery Of Past Events
This is where you showcase your best work! Event days are hectic but if you could snap some photos and share them, it will allow your portfolio to come alive. Show off your overall event designing with details. And if the host allows it, you can snap some pictures of the guests enjoying themselves too. If you don’t have much photography skills you can hire a professional photographer and let them know what style and angles you want them to click.
You can include before and after photos of the venue, always remember to use high-quality images, be creative, and pay attention to the details even what’s going on in the background in a photo. This section of your event planning portfolio should be updated regularly. As the trends, your talents and expertise are changing too.
Social Media Links
To thrive as a successful event planner, you need to connect with every potential client in every way possible – social media is one of the best ways out. Without spending much social media provides access to a pool of potential customers. When it comes to deciding on the platform, Facebook and Instagram offer numerous benefits. You start out strong but somewhere along the line you feel like losing your market. Each platform has a different shelf life for the posts.
When posting on social media platforms, it’s not always necessary to show only the results – celebrations, decorations, successful events, or happy clients. What clients see is the tip of the iceberg. To add a little personal touch to that, show them the pictures of behind the scenes, your hard work, your team’s contribution, strategies & planning, and your daily routine. Some other ideas you can share on social media for a strong event planning portfolio are
- Blog posting
- Tag your client, venue, or vendor
- Start an instructive series
- Ask your client’s opinion
- Post something different, it doesn’t always have to be about business.
Bonus Tip
Now that you have your portfolio ready all you need is a resourceful tool to manage your staff and connect with your clients. Well, we have a quick fix for that as well. Picktime, a cloud-based event scheduling software to help the events and activity organizers. With Picktime you can conduct group or one on one bookings at multiple venues. Using Picktime you get SMS & email event reminders, 24×7 email support, and real calendar availability. Just sync your calendar (Apple/Google/Outlook) with the Picktime calendar and you will no longer mix any personal and business meetups.
Not only this with Picktime you will get a personalized booking page and a book now button for your website. With its user-friendly interface, you can add users and services by using any device. Sign up for free today and Picktime will take care of your client and staff management, revenue, account activities, payments, upcoming events, customer booking forms, and all other tasks in a few clicks.
Try to build a portfolio of a minimalistic design pattern with eye-catching portrays. Create a well-planned and detailed event planning portfolio and showcase all of your talents and accomplishments.
