Choosing Your Party Priorities
Or, how I learned to stop worrying, and love the scope I’ve got.
Scope creep is, to some extent, inevitable. As you go about planning an event, you will have more ideas, want to include more people, and find more ways to spend money. Staying in budget and on target is extremely difficult when you’re working on a large, fun project over time. Part of the solution is to anticipate this and build in buffers so you have room to expand, and part of the solution is being extremely judicious about which ideas you undertake by evaluating them realistically, critically, and anticipating hidden the costs or labor involved ahead of time. In essence, becoming a master of keying into party planning ROI (return on investment.)
Making good decisions about the ROI of any party element means really, truly, understanding the cost of the thing you’re evaluating, and really, truly, understanding the impact on your event. Measuring these things accurately is hard so here’s a little framework for when you’re considering the complete (often hidden) cost of each element of your event and how to consider some of the ways a party feature can add value. Note: some items on your budget will be absolutely mission-critical (like having a venue) so you may not think to run those parts of your budget through this evaluative process, but I recommend answering these questions about every part of your event budget, so you can compare the optional things you’re considering allocating resources to with the essential components of your event. Having more budget items on your comparison list will help tune your inner-compass for better decision making.
Evaluating cost:
Cost of materials, including staffing costs.
Number of hours to create (both off and on site, budget extra time)
Number of people involved in setup (including volunteers)
Number of people involved in operation (including volunteers)
Number of people involved in strike (including volunteers)
Duration of strike (estimate extra time)
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Physical space this occupies at the event
Evaluating return:
Will your event fail without this thing?
What percentage of your guests will get to experience it?
What problems does it solve?
How many other parts of your event are complemented by this thing?
How memorable will it be/will it be majorly discussed after your event ends?
And the ephemeral part that separates art from pure business logic: how deeply do you love this thing, compared to all the other things you’re including in this event?
That last, seemingly impractical part matters because your (and your crew’s) authentic enthusiasm for what you create will drive your energy, motivation, and your ability to build hype and excitement. Make space to do impractical things that bring you infectious joy and delight — that joy will define the culture you’re building.
Making smart, tactical decisions needs to be balanced against your creative spark. The intersection of pleasure-seeking muses and strategic efficiency is where excellent, sustainable parties exist. If you are strictly pragmatic, you run the risk of crushing your creativity, but if you aren’t mindful and measured in how you prioritize your planning, your event will end up costing much more than it needs to, and be a lot more work for comparatively little benefit to the actual guest experience.
If you discover something solves a lot of problems, but does so in an expensive way, there is often space to explore more cost and energy efficient ways to accomplish the same, or at least a similar, thing. That can mean really digging into the purpose of what you’re doing, and thinking outside of the box for ways you can achieve that purpose.
I worked with a co-host on a Halloween party in 2018 who had a desire to buy a large quantity of orange marigolds (Day of the Dead flowers) and fill one of the dance rooms with the flowers as a surprise reveal at 4am (during the all night rave.) That idea sounds magical, until you think about the hidden costs beyond the price of flowers: the energy of emptying a dance room (likely to inadvertently send lingering guests home); the effort involved in buying fresh flowers in bulk at 4am — including how hard it is to get reliable, fast-moving, errand and set-dressing staff at 4am; the actual time it would take to get the flowers into the venue (discreetly, if they are meant to be a surprise) and then arrange the flowers; and the cleanup mess caused by inevitably shed and crushed petals — a biological material that will squish, stain, and smell if not cleaned completely in a short timeframe. Compare those costs to the impact: the small number of attendees likely to be still present at 5am, and cogent enough to care about a room now being filled with flowers when they were happily dancing or lounging. Luckily it was easy to talk him out of it as only about 10% of our guests were still in the venue when 4:00am rolled around. Instead, their sunrise reward for dancing through the night was a complimentary breakfast on the roof at dawn, which is something tired people who have been up all night definitely want, and is a much simpler feat to pull off. More guest satisfaction with significantly less labor.
Pragmatism can kill creativity, so the dance between having ambitious and unique goals and making sure the effort and resources you spend on an event have the most positive impact possible is an ongoing balance. An event that’s more focused on efficiency than creativity can suffer for it by ending up a bit bland or generic. However, an event planned without a wise editor’s red pen auditing each idea for feasibility and hidden costs can become a complete disaster. The real sweet spot is when true creativity operates within the constraints of feasibility and you’re able to do unique and magical things with a great effort to reward ratio, that takes skill.
