An endurance event is an investment of time, talent and financial resources, and represents the combined effort of excited athletes, willing sponsors and generous donors — but it all starts with your volunteers. Your endurance event won't endure past the first year without their help. Going from inaugural to successful annual event requires the return of loyal volunteers with enthusiasm and dedication to your cause. Prioritizing volunteers' value ensures that core of repeat volunteers calls you next year to sign up before you call them.

The disaster of Fyre Festival is still fresh on everyone's mind. There's value in learning from the failures of others. That said, proper event planning and management can make your's a hit and the talk of the town for all the right reasons—not the wrong ones. Here are the five most common pitfalls that festivals face and how you can overcome them.

The entry is the first impression participants get when they arrive at an festival. A seamless and streamlined entry can be the difference between a good first impression and a negative one. First impressions are very important because they are built upon. A good first impression leads to a happy participant and great positive feedback. Here are a few tips to help streamline your entry and give a great first impression.

In today's climate, the best way to attract attention and attendance to any event is through social media.  People are more likely to learn about what's going on in the community through quick check-ins to their favorite online media channels because they tend to look at those sites several times throughout every day. A strategic plan for getting your message out into the world can help ensure a successful event.

One of the most crucial aspects of planning a major event is securing sponsorship. Sponsors collaborate with you, spread awareness of your event through their own social reach, help raise money, and get your message out there. It's a big role to fill and you need to make sure you find the right sponsors whose goals match your own. How do you do that?

Volunteers are no longer a extra convenience in running successful tournament events. Nowadays, they're essential. If your volunteer staff is not fully engaged, trained, and organized, you run the risk of producing a chaotic event that can put off both present and future attendees. So here are 10 tips to help ensure your tournament's success.

When you plan an event for a non-profit organization, having a recruitment strategy to get the best volunteers available is essential. Your volunteers are integral to your event's success, and a well-managed recruitment program helps ensure a high return on your event investments. So here are four steps to recruit volunteers for a successful non-profit event:

Not all event volunteers are the same. The very best volunteers for your event are reliable, tech-savvy, eager to learn, and wonderfully adaptive to the public and to an environment with swiftly changing priorities. However, top volunteers have lots of options, and find what they're looking for elsewhere in a volunteer experience if they can't find it at yours. Here are five strategies for retaining your very best volunteers:

Great volunteers are the secret to a successful event. They give first and last impressions, so they make or break the event for which you've been planning all this time. So there's nothing's more important than a well-managed recruitment process. Read on to discover the complete guide for successful volunteer recruitment process.

Anyone who plans a sports tournament knows that the strengths and weaknesses of its volunteer staff can make or break the event. So investing in your volunteers' training and tools is key. We've taken some important tips from an interview with Ruth Nicholson, founder of GO!, to get the best advice on the matter, and we've summarized some highlights below. So read on to find out how to build a strong volunteer management program for your sports tournament!

Planning an endurance race event is hard work, but rewarding. Race events have a lot of moving parts from registration to spectator entertainment, in order to organize a successful event you need a reliable plan to get started. To ensure everyone's safety and enjoyment, follow these seven basic steps.

This year was San Diego Comic-Con's 50th annual event and brought in an estimated 135,000 attendees. As the most popular fandom convention, that growth may seem like an impossible scenario, but it's not alone. Each year, fandom conventions become more and more popular and they are popping up in towns around the world. How do you promote an event like that? Here are a few tips.

Every event planner knows that festivals take a lot of work. But regardless of the scale of your event, there are basic steps involved which apply to most festival planning stages. So use this ultimate festival planning guide to make your next festival your most successful one yet.

As you know, sports tournaments take a lot of planning and well-focused execution to be a success. Logistics, safety, cleanliness, and customer service are just a few of the areas you need to cover to ensure that the public is saying great things about your event -- both online and offline.  We have teamed up with industry expert Ruth Nicholson founder of GO!, who has worked in youth and semi-professional sports, particularly soccer, for more than 30 years. Ruth has provided her expertise in order to help define what makes a tournament successful. So let's take a look at seven signs of a successful sports tournament.

People love races and other endurance events, but there are a lot of them. Besides, anyone can step out their front door and run 10 kilometers. Why should they pay an entrance fee to run with you? Themes bring excitement to your race and make someone say, "Oh, this one sounds like fun!" Here are 10 fantastic theme ideas to consider for your next endurance event.

Sporting events are one of the best ways to bring together athletes and spectators alike for a day of light-hearted entertainment. A good endurance event should not only provide a safe, appropriate venue for the participants but engaging activities for the spectators to engage in as well. Here is five ways to ensure the spectators of your next sporting event enjoy an experience they won't forget.

Organizing a sporting event or tournament can be a great way to bring people together to enjoy some competition, but the logistics can become overwhelming pretty quickly. We spoke with industry expert Ruth Nicholson founder of GO!, who has worked in youth and semi-professional sports, particularly soccer, for more than 30 years to bring her expertise to this article. In order to ensure you're planning for success make sure you avoid these 4 common pitfalls when organizing your next sports tournament.

Every year, thousands of attendees from all over the world come to the Social Media Examiner's three-day mega-conference, Social Media Marketing World (SMMW). But the event had become so popular, event staff found, old methods of volunteer management were no longer as effective. Today the SMMW conference volunteer program is more connected, efficient, and focused than ever. Read on to discover why the Social Media Examiner invests in their conference's volunteer program each year with InitLive.

Conferences are some of the best places to meet like-minded colleagues within the same industry or creative individuals who share similar interests. In an increasingly interconnected world where relationship is key for business, conferences are a must-have for proper networking. And the company that organizes the conference will have the most prestige and visibility at the event.

But, you already know all that. You also know that planning a conference can be tricky— how do you create a dream conference that will go smoothly and benefit you, the organizer, and all attendees? Try these five tips:

There are many moving parts that go into planning a sports tournament, from the perfect venue to ensuring you have correct number of water stations. Every detail that goes into planning a sporting tournaments will help ensure that you hit your sporting event out of the park  Here are a few tips to consider as your start planning your next sports tournament.

So you are going to hold a sporting event?  Running, swimming, biking, climbing, baseball, football, soccer...whatever your event, chances are there are Facebook users out there who want to know about it.  Statista reports, "As of the first quarter of 2019 Facebook had over 2.38 billion monthly users worldwide." That number represents a great reason to utilize Facebook to create your promotion plan. Below are a few more:

In 2019, LinkedIn has 630 million users, with 303 million monthly active users. In the USA alone, there are 177 million LinkedIn users. When it comes to channel B2B marketing, LinkedIn is the number 1 platform for content distribution. Now, of the 630 million users, only 3 million share their content weekly.

If you're an event planner, you know how important it is to keep in direct contact with your volunteers -- and how much time you lose when you don't. According to a recent case study, the Indy Premier Soccer club tournament event recently saved 88% of the time it usually took to successfully manage volunteers during its major fundraiser, the IPSC Annual Halloween Classic. Read on to see how InitLive made the soccer club's annual fundraising tournament a smashing success.

You probably know that Twitter was the first to use hashtags to promote a topic or event. And now, they're being used throughout all the major social media channels by companies and individuals alike to promote special events. Below you'll find our ultimate guide to promoting your festival event hashtag.