Planning and managing a successful event in Company X

Abstract

The thesis is written for Company X, which is a non-profit and community-driven organization, a sister organization to several well-known startup companies in the Metropolitan Area of Finland. Company X inspires people from diverse backgrounds, origins, and skillsets to consider either starting a business of their own or to join a startup ecosystem and work for existing startup companies for better skills utilization and acquisition. The community encourages people by organizing different kinds of events, workshops, trainings, talks, and programs, which further help people get new knowledge and ideas, develop new skills and competences, network and grow professionally. This thesis discusses how to plan and conduct a successful event for Company X. The event is named Idea Development Week and it was held from 11th to 15th of March 2019.

The thesis aim is to define the mechanism of planning and organizing an event for Company X. Such an industry as event management and the process of the event outlining is discussed in the theoretical part of the thesis. After the Idea Development Week (IDW) event, the data was obtained by spreading and collecting feedback questionnaires for further analysis. To analyze the answers both quantitative and qualitative approaches were implemented. The practical study implementation deliberates the stages in planning IDW for Company X and gives recommendations for future scheduled events.

The main takeaway from the analysis of feedback forms is the affirmation that the Idea Development Week event was fairly successful. However, there is always room for future development. It mainly concerns making changes to the existing respond system (RSVP), feedback questionnaires content, improvements in the event flow during each of the program days and creating partnership opportunities with invited speakers.