Event Architects To Know in 2024 - Robert Brown, Full Range Productions
Robert Brown, of Full Range Productions, discusses how he builds and plans meetings and events in the evolving hospitality landscape of 2024.
Luke Whalin
May 7, 2024
Welcome to the HopSkip Planner Spotlight Series, where we highlight event professionals making waves across the events industry to share lessons learned and raise awareness of their invaluable contributions.
Name: Robert Brown
Company Name: Full Range Productions
Job Title: Founder/Event Producer
Can you briefly tell us about your background in event planning and how you got started in the industry?
When I was in college, I joined the committee that did all of the entertainment booking for the school, leading the group my senior year. In my sophomore year, they created a technical staff as a student job to run audio production for the campus coffee house, dorm events, and other miscellaneous events around campus. After college, I spent several years focused on technical production, and then I started taking on more roles that required a broader range of event planning and production skills. Two decades later I own my own production company that provides accreditation, access control, and production services for large-scale events.
How do you go about selecting the perfect hotel or venue? What factors weigh most heavily in your decision?
I think the event's space is one of the most important and often overlooked factors in venue sourcing. Events bring people together, and people must be comfortable moving about the physical space if they are going to enjoy the experience. Space, and by extension, crowd management, for events drives so many of the activations that we can provide, the safety and security of the event, the guest experience, and the operational efficacy of staff. We spend a lot of time thinking about the end results that we want to see at our events, but how we are going to get those things done and engage the guests while onsite starts with the physical space of the venue.
One of the common challenges that impact event budgets is the dreaded last-minute changes. I see this come up often from internal client initiatives or opportunities that arise late in the planning process that require changes to the timeline, staffing, and/or equipment infrastructure. A great idea for an activation or element that comes very late in the planning process can be expensive to execute, sometimes too expensive. I’m a big believer in picking and choosing what to do, and then going above and beyond what the attendees are expecting to deliver those elements of the event. If a client doesn’t have the budget to do everything they want, having a conversation to set realistic expectations about what is feasible to do and to do well is important.
How do you leverage technology to boost efficiency during the planning, execution, and post-event stages? What does your “event tech stack” look like? (For example, using Survey Monkey for surveying attendees post-event)
A focus of mine over the last several years has been access control and accreditation for large-scale events that are aimed at supporting the needs of the non-ticketed personnel onsite (staff, vendors, sponsors, volunteers, talent, etc.). I’m currently developing a proprietary software program to provide end-to-end access control solutions. Knowing who is on-site, where they are going, and who they are working for is critical for the safety and security of events. Event producers need more than an Excel list of companies onsite; we need more than generic all-access passes that are given out to every vendor in bulk, and hoping they don’t pass out a few extra to friends and family. Event producers need tech that supports effective, efficient, and controlled assignment of access for working personnel that doesn’t cost half of their security budget and doesn’t take 6 months of planning to implement.
Do you use frameworks, templates, or other tools/documents to help you stay organized and manage the event planning process?
Templates and processes are critical for event planning. The most challenging part of event planning is the communication across teams and updates/changes to schedules or production needs. Anything that streamlines communication and information sharing across teams – templates, update memos, training sessions, documentation, etc. is worth its weight in gold as long as the information is relevant to the audience receiving it. Established relationships among vendors and clients are one of the most important things to build over time to be successful. If I know a client’s expectations, how their organization functions, how their attendees behave, or unique circumstances/groups at their event, as a vendor I can proactively plan to support the unique needs accordingly. Having a trusted vendor can save a significant amount of time and money. These relationships don’t happen overnight, but they are worth the effort on both sides.
Do you have any specific strategies or insights for enhancing the attendee experience at your events?
Center the planning around the attendee experience – every element of the event should be looked at in terms of how it impacts their experience. There’s nothing more damaging to the long-term success of an event than the attendees walking away dissatisfied. The pressure to reduce a budget line is always present, and the question of how that reduction will impact the attendee experience has to be raised. I’ve never seen a client happy that they saved a little bit of money after something disappointed their attendees at the event – it’s never worth it.
Effective communication is crucial in any planning process. How do you ensure you and your event stakeholders are always on the same page?
Planning timelines and decision deadlines need to be planned up front and communicated clearly, and they need to be evaluated on how successful they were during the process. I don’t think all-staff meetings are great communication tools – the content is either so broad that it’s not actionable, or it’s so specific that it only matters to a fraction of the people. Saying (or more likely emailing) something that isn’t absorbed by the audience doesn’t qualify as good communication. That’s just speaking into the void. Good communication results in something. As much as possible, communication should be targeted, specific, actionable, and relevant to the audience’s scope of responsibility.
Emergency/Incident planning at events is a must-have at this point in the industry. Clients and event planners have too much liability at stake to just cross our fingers and hope things work out well. Safety and security planning needs to be a foundational element of the event planning process. For large events, an incident command center should be set up to serve as the hub for operations, guest experience, safety/security, and logistics management.
I’ve worked with several incident management software programs and some of the core functions needed are incident reporting for both guests and attendees, geo-location tagging for incidents, logging/tracking/dispatch control, after-action reporting, and emergency communication. Incident planning isn’t something that you can do when you arrive onsite, it needs to start on day one of planning. Experienced crowd managers and safety/security planners should have a seat at the table.
Several years ago, I was responsible for the communication planning for a city-wide event in New York City. The radio communications vendor we hired had an antenna relay that they were using, and unbeknownst to us, a software update had been made days before our event. It had the same vendor, same antenna, and same operations as we had done for several years prior, and this time, it failed, and there was nothing we could do to fix it at that moment. We had thousands of staff and hundreds of radios out all across the city, and as they all turned on their radios, the network crashed. The network was unusable, except for the two emergency channels that we had set up on another antenna network. Communications were crowded, but we had them, and we could safely produce the event.
Plan for things to fail, if you have a backup plan when they do go wrong, then you can implement that and move forward safely and successfully.
What are the typical steps you take in the post-event phase?
Debriefs are a must-have and they should have substantial time and resources put towards them. What went well and what didn’t and be honest about why. Evaluate when decisions are made during the planning process – timing can be a critical piece to the success or failure of an element of the event. Document when decisions are made and lay that out for evaluation during the debrief. Review the debrief before you start planning the event next year.
What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you use to evaluate the success of an event?
For accreditation and access control planning, we primarily use a timeline-centric set of measurements to evaluate the operations. When did our accreditation system launch, when were applications submitted, what Groups/Departments submitted them by the deadline, and which didn’t? We can be very data-driven, and digging into the details is necessary – averages and ballpark figures aren’t enough. We want to identify our most challenging areas and focus on them – that’s where the improvement will happen. Data always has a reason for being the way it is - find that reason and create a solution to improve that metric for next year.
What advice would you offer someone just starting their career in the meetings and events industry?
Variety is everything. There’s no one right way to plan an event and there’s no one that knows everything about event planning. There are a lot of experienced people who still do a lot of things in a not-the-best way. Good ideas can come from CEOs or interns. Be willing to learn from everyone you meet, both good and bad lessons. Pay attention to the quiet people too. Most importantly, don’t think that your way is always the best way – be willing to listen to others for perspective or their ideas. Be willing to change how you do things if there’s a better way. Always try to learn new things about the industry.