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SHR6E037P~001 Portfolio: Event Planning TEMPLATE

Rationale

Introduction

During the following piece of writing I will aim to outline the process our group went through in order to plan and prepare for our event. I will make reference to time management, finance, marketing and promotion throughout, discussing how we came to conclusions and also ways in which things didn’t run as smoothly as we may have hoped.

In early march 2026, my group consisting of Oliver Hargreaves, Ben Gosling Davies, Tom Harte, Brynley Martin and myself, will be putting on a night of heavy/mathy/midwest bands. The gig will take place in the city centre at renowned Leeds venue Key Club. The venue has been a champion for unsigned rock adjacent artists in the north for quite some time, hosting the likes of muse, arctic monkeys and fall out boy. The line-up will be curated as follows –  First support will be Janata (heavy psychedelic rock) this is due to them being a relatively new band who’ve had a good amount of Leeds gigs before opening for other acts. They’ll be followed by how do you plead?  (heavy pop punk / metal), a slightly more experienced band who will bring the energy up even further and finally New Damage (Rhythmic Jazz rock with post punk influence) will be headlining the evening. We feel this band is best suited to headline as they will probably bring the most energy due to their fast highly rhythmic nature. We aim to sell the gig as a student event and keep the ticket prices low as a means of facilitating this. We expect most of our ticket sale will come from friends and followers of the bands all of which are conservatoire or ex conservatoire attendees and also hope to capitalise on the Key Club’s local status and university of Leeds fanbase. We feel that the bands we selected will provide an eclectic balance of genre that should cover most tastes of the typical key club regular whilst still retaining a consistent and musically similar vibe the to evening. Another reason for choosing Key Club was the sense of community it withholds around the Leeds alternative scene, my brother used to attend rock and metal society at university of Leeds who regularly held events at key club, aswell as general student nights with reduced entry fee. All these reasons mean that key club is held in high regard among many students who are fans of the styles of music we will be playing on the night.

Time management 

After coming to a state of agreement on the theme and musical consistency of the event we then planned out a rough timeline of events in order to properly plan the night. Each group member was responsible for undertaking different tasks based on their skill sets. We decided Oliver Hargreaves would be best suited as group leader, Ben Goslin Davies would take the role of production lead, Tom Harte as booking agent due to his experience in this and network of people who book Key Club’s bands. Brynley Martin would be responsible for Social media & Marketing and finally myself on graphics.

I felt I was best suited to this role as this is something I have been heavily involved with since school. Since then numerous bands that I have worked with have needed logos, EP/album art and general gig posters, and this has been something I’ve been happy to assist on. Academic refer Assigning team roles helped us to work efficiently in our own time and then come together during weekly meetings having completed small tasks individually. An online research page states [1] When assigning roles and responsibilities, consider the strengths and skills of each team member. Leveraging individual strengths can lead to increased productivity and job satisfaction. We thought this would be a better approach than working on one task as a group together before moving onto a new task.this allowing us to make good progress each week, delegating new tasks as the previous ones get checked off. 

We brainstormed how to manage the time on the actual night. With a curfew of 23:30 we decided on doors: 19:30, Janata 20:00-20:30, How Do You Plead? 20:45-21:15 and New Damage 21:30-22:20. We felt that having a good hour of leeway after the headline act and before the curfew will allow for any unforeseen circumstances on the the night. For example an issue with lighting or band members forgetting leads etc could take time to troubleshoot so having a built in margin for error would account for this.  

Finance

To fund all of the up front fees and booking costs we will be splitting everything evenly 5 ways. In order to plan the best possible event and also ensure we give ourselves good chance of profiting or at the least recouping our initial investment we first needed to plan how to make the event financially successful. After contacting the venue the figure which was quoted to us for hire was two-hundred and thirty-five pounds, this will also include lighting and PA for no extra charge. The venue capacity is three-hundred, we are only expecting around a hundred and fifty to be in attendance but booking a venue with a larger capacity will make it possible to make a large profit if the promotion and marketing aspect goes a lot better than we plan for. We were also given the option of provided backline for a small extra fee, they haven’t yet disclosed what that amount would be however we decided that it would be best to provide the backline ourselves to save the money. We would either do this by booking through university facilities counter or just providing it ourselves. If certain equipment is fully booked out around that time, I have access to a guitar amp and a drum kit that i’d be happy to use on the gig.

We also allocated fifty-pounds to cover catering for the bands to make sure theres food and drink in the green room, none of the bands we chose to book had any specific rider requirements so we decided that bottled water, around thirty beers and a selection of crisps and biscuits would suffice. Another way we decided to cut the cost of the night was through the use of our own sound technician, key club offer their sound guy’s services at a rate of sixteen-pounds per hour. This could end up costing us around eighty pounds assuming we would need their services for five hours so instead we have opted to use one of the group members friends who is happy to work for a fee of twenty five pounds and already has some experience operating sound desks at gigs.

We allocated one-hundred pounds to both leaflets and posters which sound cover high quality coloured printing costs, these are being designed by myself and we’ll distribute them across Leeds as a group so they’ll be no extra costs there. A further twenty-five pounds was allocated towards paying for the physical tickets. For all the costs we chose as a group to over estimate the price as to not be met with any unexpected costs later down the line, and if everything goes to plan we should receive more profit than we expected doing things this way. The total costs was worked out by Oliver to be five hundred and seventy pounds, after discussing profit margins amongst other things we figured that six pounds online and eight pounds on the door would be a nice balance of affordability combined with high potential for profit margins. Myself and a friend put on a gig similar in genre to this last summer and our main takeaway from it was that the tickets were too cheaply priced, we priced that gig at four pound online and six pounds on the door, although we managed to sell around one hundred tickets, we barely broke even, and after talking to attendees after the fact we discovered many of them would’ve been happy to pay slightly higher prices.

Production

We began thinking about the production of the evening we started by shortlisting several venues that are known for the sort of music we were hoping to put on, a few of these included Lending Rooms, Santiago bar and Oporto. We landed on Key Club as it fits the vibe of the night, has a large capacity of three hundred and it is situated right in the city centre near lots of student accommodations and also has a large student fanbase as a venue. We chose to use student bands on the bill for multiple reasons, firstly we felt it would meld well with our venue of choice as Key Club thrives on student nights and has always had a strong grass roots focus, we also wanted to give a platform to smaller up and coming bands. Finally we chose these kind of bands so we could get away with paying a smaller fee, meaning we could get three bands on the bill instead of having one student band and then one more professional established band for the same price. We opted for this approach so they’ll be more music over the course of the evening enhancing the viewer experience. All the bands have submitted a very similar stage plot which will make our lives a lot easier on the night as we are planning on being the stage crew on the night of the gig. All bands will need drums centre back of the stage with a monitor, three mic stands and monitors at the front situated on the left, middle and right of the stage. To keep the crowd engaged between sets we will curate a playlist of similar music, this hasn’t yet been done but we have discussed the approximate style of such a playlist. It will include bands such as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Black Midi and Bring Me the Horizon as well as many others. A full bar will be available and staffed on the night for the audience to use, as previously stated Key Club is a venue well equipped for dealing with this style of event so there should be no issues regarding hospitality on the evening. The venue also boasts spacious toilets with plenty of room for all genders, there’s also disability access provided as long as arrangements can be made before the night [2]. The equipment we will use on the night will be Yamaha stage custom drum kit, Vox ac15, fender deluxe reverb, DI bass and mics. All this we plan to book out from the facilities counter. 

Contingency plan. 

Faulty sound tech gear? On the night of the gig we will have Ben’s friend will Uttley to assist with any issues of this nature. Furthermore  I will bring my car to the venue and remain sober so if any gear stops working I can hop in the car and rent it from the conservatoire or various friends I have around Leeds. We will also make sure to check any and all equipment used on this night is properly PAC tested to avoid any unnecessary failures to both the equipment we use and anything  belonging to the venue. 

Issues with sound technician? Ben who is a member of our group and on the production pathway has experience in running a sound desk and will be on standby on the night if we need someone to step in and manage sound.

Bands dropout? We have a fourth band that we are in communication with who would be willing to step in if necessary. If New Damage drop out they could come in and headline without any issues, they have previously headlined key club so would be suited to this. If how do we plead or Janata drop out we would either drop New Damage down the bill or have Student Slasher film (backup band) as the final support act. We also have a fifth backup option if it came to it – Pale Sailor.

Unexpected venue closure? If the venue is forced to shut due to unforeseen circumstance we would immediately alert all the bands and get them to issue a statement on all social media platforms to their followers. We would also do the same on our instagram promotional page. Depending on how soon before the event this occurs we would look at moving to a different venue in Leeds with similar capacity or if that wasn’t possible issue a full refund to all customers via the ticketing company Ticketpass.

Medical emergencies? All UK bars and pubs are required by law under the health and safety first aid regulations act 1981[3] to have an appointed first-aid specialist and a fully stocked first-aid kit. The rules are even stricter on larger capacity venues such as key club. I will also be on standby with my car if the ambulance wait time is too long for non life threatening medical emergencies. 

Marketing publicity

Brynley, our groups allocated social media spokesperson will create a promotional instagram page under the name Riot Circuit promotions, we feel this name will give a good impression of the genre of music we are putting on as it implies a punky and rebellious sentiment all of which relate to the bands we are hiring on the night. We didn’t want to start the instagram page too soon because, from personal experience, doing so can lead to the page stagnating. It’s better to start up the instagram page a month before the gig date and post regular content in the lead up, as to remain relevant and not run out of material to post which which could render us algorithmically irrelevant.

We plan on making a selection of reels to release in the run up to the gig. [4] According to a Sprout Social survey of more than 1,000 US consumers as part of the 2022 Sprout Social Index, short-form videos are more engaging for viewers. Some ideas we had involved a more personalised approach to marketing where we will interview each band individually and get them to explain a little bit about the history, genre and influences of their band. This will be accompanied by some audio of each band performing one of their songs and we will keep these reels short to maximise engagement. Furthermore we plan to release the poster via social media and continue to repost it on in-between days of main content to maintain regular posts.As stated in a marketing research article [5], Brands must foster interaction on social media platforms, as this is critical to the effectiveness of SMM as a communication tool. Upon the launch of the social media account we’ll also do a collaborative post with all the bands playing the gig, this will be a good way of instantly gaining new followers on the account.

A good approach which we spent time discussing was the use of paid social media advertisements, this can be important because it works outside of social media’s standard algorithm, instead of having to receive initial followers and then rely on post interactions to push the posts to followers of our followers and then followers of their followers etc… it works by recommending it straight to people who instagram feel are most likely to interact with the post or attend the advertised event. We also discussed using paid and or free marketing space in online alternative Leeds blogs aswell as reaching out to people at Leeds student radio for airtime who I have links with myself.   

Another approach we will be taking is physical marketing, as members of the online generation myself and the rest of the group are all acutely aware that there’s such a high density of people marketing online it can be hard to be heard. In order to add an extra string to our bow we will contact the student union for permission to set up a table at the top of the stairs to cafe bar in the week leading up to the gig. We will spend around twenty pounds on an assortment of baked goods and offer them out freely in exchange for a dialogue around the gig we believe this will greatly help boost ticket sales by putting a face to the name of the promotion company. We plan on doing this over the course of multiple days in pairs, this will make us more approachable going in pairs as opposed to all 5 group members sat around the table simultaneously.

The other more typical way we will be advertising the gig will be through posters and leaflets, they’ll be designed by myself and we will go around various student hotspots around Leeds to distribute them, for example, Crash Records, Belgrave music hall, Wharf Chambers, Brudenell social club and of course plenty around Leeds conservatoire.   

Technical Specifications

Press Kit

Press release

Replace this example with your press release as a PDF.