Special Events + Business Intelligence = Success

A good friend asked for a favor as she was preparing for another special event.  She works for a non-profit group and somehow, nearly single-handedly puts together terrific events and raises thousands of dollars as part of her job responsibilities.

She is currently  in the final stages of planning another event this week and called me for a bit of resource assistance.  My friend received a couple of tickets for an Anaheim Ducks game as a silent auction item and wanted to know if I had items that could enhance the presentation.

Of course I did.  I got a hockey stick and T-shirt with the team logo over to her to help dress up the presentation.

We got to speaking about the weekend’s festivities and she said that she was expecting some 250 people for the 3rd annual fundraising event.  This was an increase, she noted, of more than 100 people more than a year ago.

“Why such a difference?” I inquired.

“I don’t know,” she admitted.  ”I think it is because of the time of year and the day we chose a year ago.”

Therein lies the challenge.  People who put on special events, from my experience concentrate on the planning and execution.  Here is the secret.  Special Events + Business Intelligence = Success.

Putting on the event is only part of the job.  To learn more, follow the story to www.sportsinfo101.com

Let the Wild Rumpus start!

Let the Wild Rumpus start! The NFL playoffs are here and there are four games this weekend, Two games today and two games tomorrow.
Today, the New York Jets travel to take on the Cincinnati Bengals in a game that starts at 4:30 p.m. ET and 1:30 p.m. o the West Coast.
In the late game, the Philadelphia Eagles will play the Dallas Cowboys in an 8:00 p.m. (ET)/5:00 PT kickoff.
Both games are being televised on NBC

Bowl’d Over, Finally

Tonight is it.  The final of the 956 annual college football bowl games leading up to the BCS championship between the University of Alabama and the University of Texas.

This game decides who will be named national champion, unless of course you hail from Boise State and you want to be considered in the same sandbox.  I have heard some media reports that Boise, who finished the season 14-0, could be named #1 in the next fall’s pre-season college football poll.

TV ratings are expected to be high, social media sites like Twitter will surely have thousands of folks posting messages about every other play in the game.

Most special events, outside of the Mega technology event based in Las Vegas CES have hopefully stayed away from planning any sort of event that conflicts with tonight’s game.

otherwise, be prepared for TV’s being rolled out somewhere or many folks checking their smart phones to get score updates.

NFL Playoff Game Schedules

Now that the 2009-10 NFL regular season is in the books, the planners at the National Football League get down to business pretty fast as the 2010 NFL playoffs begin in earnest this weekend.

I have just spent time updating the sports component of SportsCalendarPro.com and have added each round of the playoffs, from Wild Card Games all the way through to the NFC and AFC Championship games.  If you have purchased the subscription, then you are enjoying a central location for all major sports events.  This allows you to see which teams are playing, the location, TV broadcast and time of event.

For example, here is what you would see on the schedule, a breakdown,  for Saturday’s NFL, AFC Wild Card Game

The New York Jets vs. Cincinnati Bengals

NBC

4:30 p.m. ET

The best part of this is that you can see it within Goolge Calandar, if you like seeing your schedule online.  As for me, I do not put my scheduleds online,  Rather, everything is sync’d with my iphone and I can do that within the system as well.  For the first time in my life, I have all of the schedules in one place, iCal and iPhone.  The Sports Calendar, The Tech Calendar, the Entertainment Calendar, major holidays, friends and family birthdays, business meetings are all color coded in one place.

I love it.

A Busy January for Sports

Are you “football’d out?”

After a plethora of college and football games in the last week, my guess is, now that you have returned back to work and the remaining schedule might have escaped your thoughts, outside of the BCS National Championship Football game on Thursday this week, between Texas and Alabama.  Once I got to work this morning, I started to look at the schedule and noticed, starting tonight, there are still a number of football games including one every night between now and Thursday.

You have the 39th Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, the Fed Ex Orange Bowl and the GMAC Bowl leading up to Thursday’s championship game.

So that got me to thinking.  How bust of a January do we have in sports?  I went to my www.SportsCalendarPro.com sports schedule and did a little checking…..

I have counted 29 major sports events in January alone.  This includes the NFL playoffs, Australian Open, Baseball Hall of Fame related events and a sports related business conference towards the end of the month.  That’s just the sports side.  I also used SportsCalendarPro.com to check major technology and entertainment events for the month and, we begin this new decade, everyone seems in a hurry to hold a major event in January.

What I did note though, and something that is pretty well-known is that Tuesday and Wednesday are the slower days for events in any given month.  January being no exception.  Of course there are college basketball games and other events, but as a whole, they do not make the schedule since they are not considered national in significance.

In any case, enjoy your viewing!