Determining when to hold your event can be more of a challenge than you may think. There are several factors that may impact your event's timing- here are a few examples:
- Your venue is a community college, so you can only use the facility during student breaks
- There is another local tech event in the ~50 mile radius within a 3 month timeframe
- There's a large corporate-run conference on a specific week in your area that you want to capitalize on
- You hope to have your event in the summer, due to your family-friendly resort location
- Your venue is a hotel or conference center, and they have limited availability
You get the idea.
For this reason, you should start planning the timeframe of your event by choosing a 3 month timespan instead (unless you're piggybacking onto a bigger conference-more on that later). That timeframe will start to get narrowed down pretty quickly based on feedback from potential venues and local Meetups/User Groups. It is really important to talk to other Meetups and User Groups to determine any conflicts (and also get your event on their radar!). Such consideration builds strong community ties, opens up more potential resources for your event, and helps you to avoid those aforementioned conflicts, which can impact available sponsorship dollars and speaker pool (and possibly attendee pool).
There are a number of benefits to taking this approach. For one, potential speakers who may not otherwise travel to your event may be available. Same goes for attendees. Also, there's a LOT of energy and excitement surrounding those larger conferences, and your event stands to benefit from that extra enthusiasm.
That said, if you go this route and if you can, do the weekend BEFORE the larger conference
For your best chance at speaker and attendee engagement and RELIABILITY, pre-conference is the only way to go. After several days of conferencing, speakers and attendees both will be burned out, partied out, and ready to go home.
Since pre-conference is really the only way to go, be sure to understand the timing and location of any pre-conference workshops the larger conference may have.
Going this route also has benefits, but keep in mind the following:
- know the difference between your location's summer break and others'. This will impact speaker availability.
- be ready for extra work in the way of vacation planning. People will ask you about good things to do in your area. Be a good steward!
- If you hope to cover some expenses for your speakers, realize that holding your event during peak resort times means higher hotel and travel costs.
Story time! True story-once, an event I participated in suffered drastically when the main street to access their chosen venue was completely closed down due to a holiday parade - that they were totally unaware of. It's a good idea to check local going's on to avoid potential pitfalls such as this.