Event Planning and Dodgeball!

Tom Dodsworth who is studying Sport Business Management BSc(Hons) writes on a recent learning experience:

On Friday 17 February 2017, myself and fellow Sport Business Management students had a 4-hour session learning about how to plan, organise, run and evaluate a sporting event as well as learning the differences between products and services. This was to help us as we will have to run a sporting event of our choice in the following months.

In the morning, we learnt about setting up a sporting event, this included all factors that needed to be considered when running a sport event, as well as the characteristics and differences between products and services.

After this, we got into the groups and we were asked to draw up a sporting event that we were all familiar with and then explain how it included certain common characteristics. The service characteristics were as follows: intangible, perishable, simultaneity, variable quality and heterogeneity. At first we had to understand what each of these terms were and once we had a better understanding of this we had to apply it to the event we had chosen to talk about.

Every group then presented a different event which enabled us to get a better idea as to how these characteristics could be applied to a range of scenarios and it helped us to draw up some criteria that we had to meet to ensure that our event was service based and not product orientated.

We then heard from Arron and Dominic at Sport Brighton. Sport Brighton run campaigns to get as many people, from a range of backgrounds, to take part in sport. One of their programmes is Parklife which offers students and staff at the university social, fun and fitness activities.  Sport Brighton would be the client for the event we decide to run.

We got into our teams and were given a list of possible dates and activities to run as well as some dates with no activities specified – this allowed us to create and plan our own event. It was hard because we all had different views and we had to think about who the audience was, how to include everyone, cost (if any) and the price of hiring equipment etc. Once we were all agreed we had to fill out an initial application form which stated our team name, chosen activity, what equipment we would require, where we would run the event and what date we wanted to book the facility out for.

After this we were given a first-hand view as to what is required to run an event on a practical scale. Arron and Dominic set up a dodgeball event for us so we could see how it was organised as well as how it could possibly be improved.

We played dodgeball in teams of 4-5 people and it was thoroughly enjoyable and tiring for some! Every team played against one another and after all games had been competed we completed a feedback form. This is something we would have to include for our own event in order to see how it ran, and to see what improvements could be made so future events were more rounded. The dodgeball game gave us practical experience of how to run a simple event and something which we could take inspiration from.

Alex Exall who was on my team said: “There was a good balance between learning the theory side of running an event as well as seeing how to run it from a practical point of view.

There’s a lot more to think about when planning an event than there initially seems.”