Filling prescriptions, administering vaccinations, and counseling and screening patients are all part of a normal day as a pharmacist or pharmacy tech. Event planning usually doesn’t come up on the list too often, leaving pharmacy employees unsure of how to put together a successful pharma event.
A good event has many benefits for the pharmacy and the community, so you may want to consider hosting one. Here are the 10 fundamentals for planning a successful pharma event to help you get started.
Why Do Pharmacies Host Events?
There are many reasons why a local or chain pharmacy might want to host an event. Events ultimately attract new customers to the business, which is essential for growth. They can also cultivate and foster good relationships with the general public in your area, helping pharmacies to form a positive reputation.
Events can be used to reward loyal customers, celebrate notable achievements, or introduce a new product or service offering. They’re a great way to generate brand awareness and promote the business, especially at an organic community level.
10 Fundamentals for Planning a Successful Pharma Event
1. Decide On the Reason for the Event
First, think about why you want to host an event for your pharmacy. Ideally, you will be able to host an event related to a holiday, in celebration of new products, or alongside an event already taking place in your community. Some events, like educational conferences, don’t necessarily have to be connected to a special date or occurrence.
Event Ideas for Pharmacies
There are nearly unlimited event ideas for pharmacies. Here are just a few:
- Health awareness events. Offer free blood pressure screenings for American Heart Month or free blood glucose tests for American Diabetes Month.
- Immunization events. Host a week-long vaccination event for flu season or at the end of July just before the start of the school year.
- Educational webinars. Host a free webinar every month on an important health topic that affects people in your community and encourage residents to use healthy habits.
- Community events. Set up a booth or table at community events like job fairs or craft shows to generate large-scale brand awareness.
- Seasonal events. Join your town’s holiday parades as a team or host a bake sale with proceeds going to pay for medications for low-income individuals in the community.
- Grand opening. If your pharmacy is new, you can host an in-person or virtual grand opening party to make the community aware of your products and services.
- Birthdays and anniversaries. If your pharmacist is having a birthday or your pharmacy is celebrating an anniversary, you can host an event to honor them publicly. Chain pharmacies with multiple locations can host hybrid events where some team members virtually join an in-person gathering.
2. Iron Out Your Pharmacy’s Event Budget
Next, it’s important to determine the budget you have available to organize the event. If you work for a large chain pharmacy, you may have a sizable budget compared to a smaller local pharmacy. Regardless of how large or small your budget is, you should have a good understanding of how you’ll utilize the money.
For example, you may want to dial back spending in one area of the event in order to give you more leeway in another area. Setting up a virtual venue is most likely going to be cheaper than renting a facility for an in-person pharma event. Virtual event solutions like online registration and web conference rooms are also less costly than decorations and catering. Food, on the other hand, is one of the biggest expenses if you’re having an in-person event.
3. Recruit Workers
Whether you plan to hire employees or solicit volunteers, you should get started relatively early on in the event planning process. Make sure you have enough people on hand to make the event function smoothly, whether it’s online, in-person, or a mix of both.
You should also plan to have a few extra workers or volunteers scheduled on the day of the event in case someone is sick or doesn’t show up for their shift. You don’t want to be caught with fewer workers than you need on the day of your event when it’s too late to try to bring anyone else on.
4. Team Up With Other Local Businesses
You can increase the overall reach and exposure of your pharma event by teaming up with other businesses in your area. This can be beneficial for everyone involved and makes the event bigger and better, which draws more attention from people in the community. For maximum impact, partner with local businesses that are related to the theme of the event.
For example, if you’re hosting an event promoting a new line of vitamins, you could ask a local optometrist to offer simple vision screenings at the event and educate visitors on how vitamins impact vision and eye health.
5. Delegate Tasks
Even if your event is small, it’s impossible to try to plan and do everything yourself. It’s important to delegate tasks to your workers whenever possible. Look at their individual strengths and weaknesses to determine where their skills might be most applicable. If you’re a large pharmacy with several employees, several people can each take on one or two tasks to distribute the burden of event planning and organization across the team.
An event planning platform with third-party app integration capabilities can help you delegate tasks with ease and make sure they’re getting done even after they’ve left your desk. This prevents mishaps where a task is forgotten or doesn’t make the transfer from one department to another. You can eliminate surprises on the day of your event, even if you’re not the one doing everything to pull it together.
6. Prepare Materials for the Event
Prepare any materials you plan to use during the event in advance. Put together presentations, photo galleries, videos, charts, recordings, and other media materials so you can access them quickly and easily. It can be embarrassing to be in the middle of making a presentation only to find out that the PDF chart you had downloaded did not make it to the folder with your presentation materials.
Instead, make sure these items are accessible from multiple points. If one copy is corrupt or can’t be accessed due to connectivity issues, another copy can be retrieved from somewhere else.
7. Promote the Event
Next, it’s time to promote your event. You can do this in a variety of ways, from posting videos on YouTube to publishing blogs on your website, to posting event flyers on your social media channels. Make sure you start promoting your event in advance so people can coordinate their schedules.
By utilizing audience engagement tools, you can optimize your pharma event promotions to target potential attendees. These tools use proven strategies to boost interaction with your audience, adding value to your promotional materials.
8. Test Your Event Technology
It’s critical to test your event technology prior to the day of the event to ensure everything is working smoothly. The last thing you want is to log into the virtual meeting room 20 minutes before the start of your event only to realize that the invitations you sent out had a typo in the meeting ID.
Go through a test run of the entire event from start to finish. This allows you to work out any bugs before you have an audience. This should be one of the last steps before the event actually begins – if you test your tech too early, it could malfunction in between the time you check it and the event.
9. Attend the Event
The big day has arrived and your event is starting. Now is the time to attend and be in the moment! If you did a thorough job of planning the event ahead of time, everything should go relatively smoothly on the actual day of the event. If you are using event management software, you can follow the day’s timeline and reach out to vendors quickly in case there’s an issue. You may even be able to use these applications on your mobile device, so you can stay organized even on the go.
10. Measure the Event’s Success
Finally, it’s important to measure the success of your event. Understanding what you did well and which areas need improvement can ensure that your next event performs even better. Without a follow-up analysis, the hard work you put into optimizing the event won’t go to improving your pharmacy’s future events. Anything you learned throughout the process about what to do and what not to do will be lost.
6Connex’s virtual event platform offers analytics capabilities that allow you to accurately measure how successful your pharma event was and why so these results can be replicated. You can get comprehensive data about the performance of your events to inform your overall event planning strategies going forward.
Manage Your Pharma Event With Our All-In-One Event Platform
Planning and organizing in-person, virtual, or hybrid events for a pharmacy can quickly become overwhelming without good management tools. 6Connex offers essentially unlimited event tech integrations with third-party applications, so you can access the tools you need in one virtual environment. Our platform is a hybrid event solution that allows you to seamlessly plan both in-person and virtual event elements together.
Our virtual event products are tailored to the experience of both event organizers and event attendees. We’re also dedicated to helping organizers plan sustainable events that create a minimal carbon footprint in an effort to reduce overall worldwide carbon emissions. Request a virtual event platform demo from 6Connex by contacting our corporate headquarters in San Antonio, Texas at 210.890.5769
