Event planning

A preview of how this template lays out — the boards, their custom workflow states, and where the sample issues land. WIP caps show a badge.

• Q3 user conference

  Parent issue; sub-issues cover venue, speakers, promo, and AV.

  P113pt

• Confirm the speaker lineup

  P15pt

• Build the registration landing page

  P23pt

These rules aren't created when you apply the template — they're recipes you can wire up in Settings → Automations once your board exists.

• When

  Event moves to 'Live week'

  Then

  Notify every workstream owner and lock new scope

• When

  Event moves to 'Recap'

  Then

  Generate a post-event recap issue with metrics prompts

Booking is its own column because it is where the money stops being reversible. Everything in Planning can be changed for free; the moment a venue deposit is paid or a speaker is announced, the date is real and the budget is committed. Live week as a separate state does the same job at the other end: it is a scope freeze with a name, so that the week when everyone is busiest is not also the week somebody decides to add a second track.

1. 1.Fix the three non-negotiables before anything else

   Date, budget ceiling, and the outcome you want — pipeline, community, press, recruiting. Events drift because these are left vague and every subsequent decision gets argued on aesthetics instead. Write all three on the parent issue and treat changes to them as a decision that needs the same person who approved the budget.

2. 2.Treat Booking as an irreversible gate and record the terms

   Every contract that lands in Booking has a cancellation deadline, a minimum spend, or both, and those dates belong on the card. This is the difference between rescheduling an event and eating a five-figure loss. It is also the moment to confirm the venue's actual capacity and accessibility rather than the number on the brochure.

3. 3.Fan out into workstreams with one owner each

   Venue and logistics, speakers and content, promotion and registration, AV and production, on-site staffing. Each becomes a sub-issue under the event parent with a single name attached. The workstream that is most often unowned is AV, and it is also the one whose failure is most visible to every attendee.

4. 4.Name a run-of-show owner for Live week

   Somebody needs to hold the minute-by-minute schedule and make calls when a speaker is late or a session overruns, and it should not be the person also greeting attendees. Write the run of show as a document with times and named owners per slot. Live week is the one phase where the board is not the working surface — it is the reference.

5. 5.Recap within a week, against the outcome you named

   Registrations, attendance, the conversion you were actually after, and — most usefully — what you would not do again. Costs are freshest now and get vaguer every week. The recap that matters most is the one for an event you will repeat, because next year's planning starts from this card or it starts from nothing.

This board encodes one opinion about how the work should run. Here is where that opinion is wrong and something else fits better.

• You run frequent small webinars. A recurring monthly webinar does not need a five-phase board per instance; it needs a repeatable checklist and a promotion calendar. The per-event parent structure is overhead once the event has become a routine.
• You need registration, ticketing or badges. Attendee registration, payment, check-in and badge printing are a product category with real operational depth. This board coordinates the work of putting on the event; it does not know who is coming.
• It is a large trade show with a booth build. Exhibiting has its own machinery — booth design and fabrication, shipping and drayage, lead capture, staff scheduling — with long lead times and procurement involvement. Five columns will not hold it.
• Nobody owns the budget. Events are the fastest way to spend money badly, and a plan with no single person accountable for the total will overrun. Sort that out before configuring a board.

Honest comparisons, including where the other tool wins. Planoda is pre-launch, so nothing below is a benchmark — it is a description of how each product approaches this job.

• Cvent

  The purpose-built event platform: registration and ticketing, attendee management, session and speaker scheduling, venue sourcing, and the on-site apparatus for check-in and badging. This template covers the internal project management around an event, which is a much narrower slice of the job.

  Where Cvent is better: Everything attendee-facing is better there, and for an event of any real size it is not optional. Registration, payments and check-in are operational problems a task board cannot pretend to solve.

• Asana

  Asana's timeline view with dependencies is well suited to events specifically because event work is deadline-anchored and heavily sequenced — the venue must be booked before promotion can name it. Seeing that chain as a picture is genuinely helpful when compressing a schedule.

  Where Asana is better: For visualising lead times and dependencies against an immovable date, a timeline beats a phase board. Events are one of the clearest cases where the Gantt-style view earns its keep.

• Monday

  Monday is widely used for events because of how readable its boards are to non-specialists — the vendors, contractors and internal stakeholders who touch an event once and will not learn a tool. Colour-coded status and a clear grid are a real advantage with an occasional audience.

  Where Monday is better: If people outside your team need to read or update the plan, Monday's visual language needs less explaining than anything here. Events involve more one-off collaborators than almost any other kind of project.