Hosting a networking event; it sounds fancier than it needs to be. You don’t need to be a CEO or a socialite to plan a successful and influential networking event at a young age. Whether you’re hoping to make a career change, want to elevate yourself within your career, or simply want to make connections in your city, I recommend hosting a networking event.

Hosting an event means you get to tailor it to what you want out of an event AND position yourself as a leader. It can also develop further than just one event to a networking group or support team. You’re the boss. All sorts of wins. Let’s get cracking.

To help plan your super amazing event, we’ve created a beautiful event planner to go along with these tips and keep track of all your details!

Just like anything in life, the hardest part of planning a networking event is beginning. So where to begin?

Think big

Before you whip out a guest list or venue options, think about the overarching goals of your event. What do you want to accomplish from this event? Who do you want to meet? What image do you want to portray? What benefit will your event provide to others?

Some categories to help define your goals are:

• Professional development
• Young professionals
• Social event
• Topic-specific networking
• Alumni network
• Age connections
• Common professional goals
• Common personal interests

Identifying which of these categories is important to you will help you set the scene, decide who to invite, and decide where to host.

Your guests

Once you’ve decided your target audience and ideal event, you can start thinking about how to invite the ideal attendees. How you find these people will vary depending on what sort of networking event you want to host.

I suggest hosting your event’s registration on a pre-made event platform such as Meetup or Eventbrite. That will take a lot of headache out of the administrative work and will also advertise for you to the millions pre-registered on those sites. So, do keep in mind that when choosing who to invite, you’re not going to have to manually handpick every single invitee.

Cold Emails

If there are particularly influential people in the niche related to your event (in other words, if there are specific people you want to invite beyond those who might just find your event online), I highly suggest cold e-mailing them. You can typically find work e-mails on the company website or on LinkedIn. If you can’t, use the tips in one of my favorite networking articles ever for finding e-mails.

 

Via Companies

E-mail relevant companies and have them post it on their website. Be careful with your e-mail; you don’t want to come off as soliciting. Make sure that the company realizes this event benefits their employees’ professional development and thus, improves the company.

Networking websites

Because you’re already going use Eventbrite or Meetup for your registration, take advantage of the autopilot advertising that comes with that. Beef up your description, the tags, and categories of the event so that all sorts of people can find it without you having to do anything.

Social media

Last but certainly not least, use social media. Create a Facebook event and invite those you already know. Make the event public and allow those invited to invite others. Then, share your event on Twitter and Instagram. Use a service like Buffer to automatically schedule your tweets so that you don’t have to continually advertise manually.

Your venue

Networking events are so saturated and so hit or miss. For better or for worse, where you host it plays a big role in making sure your event is a win. Here are some ideas:

Bars

This is the easiest one and the most popular. I personally think networking at bars is an excellent choice for a venue. At first glance, it may seem somewhat unprofessional to meet those in your industry over happy hour, but a drink or two can really relax people in what can otherwise by a quite awkward situation.

Breakfast Events

My second favorite sort of networking event is over breakfast. This might have to be for a more intimate crowd, but you can make a big reservation at a cafe or diner and have your event in the morning. This gives the early birds their chance to catch the worm. Then, you don’t have to worry about peoples’ stress levels after a long day at work because they haven’t gone to work yet! And, we know everyone functions better with coffee.

Activity Events

If you want to be sure people have something to do at these events, make it more of an outing. You can have your event at a park, a bowling alley, a pool hall, etc. This takes off that awkward edge of standing around, unsure of what quite to do next or who to talk to.

Rock your networking event

You’ve done all the hard work! Now make sure you get the networking benefits out of it.

Take attendance

Whether you do this task or ask your co-chairs (see below) to do it for you, make sure you keep thorough track of who’s coming. Using platforms like Eventbrite will allow you to check people in right on their site or app; it’s super easy. Depending on what your goals for this event are, you can determine exactly what information you want to collect from your attendees. But, at a minimum, I suggest collecting the following:

• First and last name (obviously)
• Company/ position
• E-mail

Optional:

• LinkedIn URL (create a group!)
• Personal website (portray on your group’s site!)
• Phone number (depending on how personal you want to get)

Get some co-chairs

Ask some people to be your co-chairs or anchors, however you like to frame it. You can ask them to support you in whatever you need, but one thing I certainly recommend is to ask them to float around then party. It’s their job to make sure no one feels like they have no one to talk to or like they don’t belong. So many people are nervous to go to these events because they are shy, make them remember it was worth it!