You don’t have to write a 20-page report for your event brief. A few sentences or a single page might be enough to get you started with your event planning if you’re working on a birthday dinner party, a small meeting, an informal get together, or a workshop.
At the top, you should give your event a name (or working title). You can then describe why the event is being held in one or two simple sentences. “A birthday dinner party for our families” is a lot more actionable than “A birthday dinner party.” The former will make you think about guest numbers, seating requirements, food and drink, and how long the evening needs to be.
After your purpose, add information about the people going along. This shouldn’t just be “12 people.” The number and identity of your guests will help you think about the arrival flow, word on your invitations, seating arrangement, food requirements, accessibility considerations, and even how many times people will need to arrive or move within your schedule. For example, a workshop where all 15 participants show up at the same time will be different to run than an informal get together where guests will arrive gradually throughout the evening. You also don’t need to know the identity of everyone going along before you add them to your event brief; if people are yet to be invited, you could simply write something like “number of guests still to be confirmed” instead.
Before you think about your event layout, you can give it a shape by writing down the event flow. Will your guests be sitting down or moving around? Will they be watching, eating, talking, or taking part in a guided activity? This is also where you start to guard against one of the simplest mistakes when planning an event: overloading your schedule. A two-hour event needs time for the doors to open and people to arrive, greetings and introductions, to have food and drinks, a couple of scheduled activities, and to pack everything up. If your event brief doesn’t have every one of these as separate elements, you could be in trouble before you even start setting up the venue.
You can also leave the venue section fairly brief to start with. You should include what venue you have considered so far, what room type you are looking for, if there are any constraints on the layout, if any power or weather-proofing is needed, if you have to consider signposting or parking, and any queries to answer before booking the venue. Even a note like “find out how many chairs are available in the space, table sizes, access to electricity, and where food waste can be cleared away after the event” will save you from wondering about this a week before the event. If you are yet to select a venue, add the venue requirements here: a quiet room, enough space for twenty people to sit down, room for a registration table, or enough space for a food station.
Add the first few things to do. Don’t lump all the tasks into one list though. Divide your event brief into short sections (such as guest list, venue, food and drink, supplies, invitations, set-up, supplier contacts, contingency plan, and post-event review), and then write the first one or two actions under each. This will keep the document easy to read and you won’t miss sections. If the contingency plan section is empty, it’s not that you’ve failed to add anything to it; it’s a good reminder to think of what you will do if a speaker cancels or you have to leave earlier than planned.
Finally, take your brief and check: if you showed this to someone else without having to give further details, would they get the gist of the event? Can they see the purpose, who the guests might be, what the event flow might look like, what venue queries you might have, the timescale that the event has to run within, and the initial action items? If the answer to any of those questions is no, you can’t yet move on to choosing the decor and entertainment. Because those will support the purpose and help you move away from the unfinished planning decisions.
Once your event brief is in a shape that feels right, it can guide the rest of your documents such as a timeline worksheet, event planning checklist, supplier contacts document, and event schedule on the day of the event. Your event brief will probably be amended as more things become confirmed and that’s fine, and that’s part of the planning process. The goal isn’t to produce the perfect event brief before you do anything else; the goal is just to create a document which every other planning decision has a connection to so that your event comes together like a set of clearly defined notes, rather than a pile of ideas that could go any which way.