You can begin by drafting a few paragraphs, taking a few photos, and refining your ideas to submit to our program by 3 March 2025.
It is important to remember that the effort you put in during the planning stage will pay off at the other end.
The Victorian Law Week program, where your event will be showcased online, goes live on 8 April 2025. Promotion should begin on or after this date
Ready to go? Keep reading to see our tips on designing a perfect Law Week event.
Why are you running your event? It sounds like a simple question, but it needs serious thought. The answer to this question will influence all aspects of running an event.
When identifying your purpose, your focus should be on your attendees – what will they get out of it? Why would they come?
It helps to consider these questions and put your thoughts in the mind of your desired attendee to determine what event that will be most useful or beneficial to your attendees.
It might be helpful to consider:
Events are most effective if tailored to a specific group or audience. It allows you to deliver the most useful information, in the most effective way. Despite what you may think, a specific message to a small group is more likely to see measurable results than a broad message to a large group.
Law Week is about demystifying the law. So ideally, Victorian Law Week events should aim to provide legal information directly to the people need it most.
Now that you have the purpose of your event, think about who could benefit the most from your event. Be as specific as you can.
Consider:
Your first thought might be that your target audience is everyone who has a particular legal issue. This may not be specific enough, as different groups will have different needs. For example, you might want to run an event about future planning for anyone without a will. But the information needs, mode of delivery, and even the most convenient location and time for your event will differ greatly between groups such as young parents and retirees.
Your target audience should not be the general public. Why? In order to communicate effectively with your audience, you need to speak to them in a manner that is appropriate, relevant and useful – and you cannot speak to everyone effectively in the same manner. If you try to speak to everyone, you may end up speaking to no-one.
With your audience in mind, it’s time to think about how you can best engage the group you are trying to reach. Consider your event hook – why will your target audience want to attend your event? Why would they take time out of their day to attend your event over anything else they might want to do?
Keep in mind that our research has shown that most Victorians don’t identify their problem may have a legal aspect, so think about how that will affect how you reach out to people.
Your target audience should dictate:
When identifying your target audience, it is also important to consider if you have a way to reach that audience to let them know about your event. This will be discussed in the Promotion section of this Toolkit.
What can help to increase engagement is having an interesting or unusual event idea, event format or speaker, or working with another organisation that would want to reach your audience.
Here are some examples from previous Law Weeks:
It’s important to keep in mind the barriers your audience may experience when planning your event. You want to make your event as accessible as it can be to those who will come, meaning you should consider accessibility and inclusion in your event planning, promotion, presentation and evaluation.
Things to consider:
Consider the ways your event can be inclusive and accessible for all members of your target audience. This could look like offering childcare for those attending, or promoting that children are welcome to the event.
At a previous Law Week event, West Heidelberg Community Legal provided a child-friendly event with playful hands-on activities suitable for all ages to provide legal information on matters affecting women and children
There’s also merit in providing catering or transport for attendees.
Consider if there will be a cost associated to run your event. You may need to budget for room hire, catering, resources, access costs like SLIs/captioning, childcare, or transport. You may also wish to produce resources that attendees can take away with them.
Boosted social media posts or a paid campaigns in the local media could also be explored when promoting the event to your intended audience.
These things are not always necessary or appropriate for every event and you can run a highly successful event without them, but they may be a factor depending on how you envisage your set-up.
We advise that you do not consider facilitator fees, for example paying a lawyer to deliver the session. In keeping with the spirit of Law Week, legal partners getting involved are encouraged to do so pro bono.
Now that you have your event purpose and audience, it’s time to consider the things you wish to achieve from this event.
Planning an event without setting goals is like shooting arrows in the dark – relying on luck to land on your target. Your goals are measurable outcomes that you want to achieve from holding this event to evaluate its success.
By setting goals in the beginning with quantifiable metrics of success it will make it easier for your team to ensure that you reach them and get meaningful value from them.
There are many different types of goals.
Consider:
With your goals now mapped out, let’s take some time to think about how we can measure them. Depending on your goals, this can look different. Measuring attendance numbers is an easy one, you can just count how many turned up! But others such as impact can be a little harder to measure.
For impact and awareness, you could ask attendees to fill in a survey or feedback form to provide insight into how successful your event was. There are fun ways you can invite audience participation, such as with a small prize for those who contribute.
For online events, consider holding polls or Q&A sessions where you can measure the audience involvement.
You could also measure impact or awareness through social media. In today’s digitally connected world, the ripple effect of social media can be a new pathway to success. Social media mentions, hashtag usage, and engagement rates offer a window into your event’s reach and audience enthusiasm.
It is important to know how you will be evaluating your goals so that at the end of Law Week, you can determine your success! Whether you reached your goals or not, the learnings and insights can help to host an even more engaging event next Law Week.
Some other suggestions for collecting evaluation include:
If you’re struggling to think of ways to evaluate your event goals, don’t hesitate to contact us and we can support you.
