The Event Roadmap

The handbook. I’m sure you have seen these before. They can be as simple as a handout with the schedule and some key people listed or as complex as to have the entire event mapped out from session selections to speaker listings to advertisers. I have seen good ones and bad ones. Bad ones are poorly edited or structured, are missing key information, are uncomfortable to hold, and get left behind on the floor at the first chance. I am fortunate to be part of an organization who works hard at providing an amazing handbook. It is something the attendees look forward to and they keep for years to refer back to.

What features make for a good event handbook? Here are five things I have found make our attendees clamor over each other to reach the handbook table first:

• Make it helpful. The handbook should provide value to the attendee. It should have things like a quick-reference schedule and building map handy. I recommend including locations of sessions, speaker line-up, and house-keeping information like where to find restrooms and get questions answered.
• Make it eye-catching. Use the event theme or artwork. Allow it to begin to set the tone for the event. It should entice an attendee to open it.
• Make it practical. If the attendees are taking notes in the handbook, it should lay flat. You’ve experienced the uncomfortable handbook that tries to flip closed on you while you are writing or you had to break the binding on a book so it would lay flat enough to comfortably write in. It costs a little more money, but a spiral bound book is really nice.
• Edit page content. Take care not to put too much text or information on a given page. If we have learned anything in these last couple of years, it is that people don’t read what you give them. Make instructions brief, bullet any lists, and highlight only what is crucial to the attendee experience. 
• Mind colors and fonts. Creativity has its place during an event, but needs to be tempered within the pages of the handbook. The fonts need to be easily read in a dimly lit General Session. The color contrast between the fonts and the surrounding page colors contribute to this experience as well.

While we all remember the grade-school, band concert, hand-drawn, ditto machine-copied program with nostalgia, it did not contribute to the experience other than to ensure the audience, through a list of songs, knew it would be over soon.

The success of our organization’s handbook was honed over time. We have included and removed sections until we got it just right. If you are interested to know what is included in our handbook, email me!

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