In the City of Greater Dandenong, southeast of Melbourne, Australia, the Festivals and Events team hosts community events and celebrations. With a team of 5 members, they are responsible for planning and executing dynamic events that draw both local and regional crowds.
The Festivals and Events team organises a variety of events, from the Keysborough Big Picnic, attracting roughly 7,500 attendees, to the grand Springvale Snow Fest, which draws in as many as 33,000 participants. The range of events is diverse, including award ceremonies, movie screenings, and festive celebrations like Christmas Carols and New Year’s Eve fireworks.
What Successful Events Require
Event planning at this scale involves meticulous coordination with multiple stakeholders. The team collaborates closely with various council departments, including Traffic and Transport Management, Environmental Health, Building Services and Risk and Emergency Management, among others. External partners such as Victoria Police, Country Fire Authority, and local community organisations are also integral to the event’s success.
For Patrick Mageean, the Festivals and Events Officer and his team, the success of an event is not just about attendance figures. It’s about achieving set objectives, receiving positive feedback from attendees, delivering improvement from the previous events and the satisfaction rate of vendors, partners and sponsors. Regular feedback and benchmarking with other event planning units across Greater Melbourne help them stay innovative and responsive to community needs.
“You want to have your attendance numbers high. You want it to be a good investment and providing benefits for the local area, but you also want to build the events year on year,” said Patrick Mageen about successful events. “Before an event, we’ll set a number of goals that we want to hit, whether it’s engaging five different cultural groups or six different businesses or eight different community organisations, because that’s really what’s giving back to the community.”
The Greater Dandenong team also emphasizes the importance of surveys and stakeholder feedback in evaluating event success. “We assess that by surveys on the day as well, and general feedback from all our stakeholders, how engaged they were at the event and did they enjoy it. The feedback on a lot of our events is in the high 90%.”
Challenges in Planning Local Government Events
Before adopting OnePlan, the team used tools like Microsoft Word or PDFs with images of the event site where they would add symbols in to mark the infrastructure. The team faced numerous challenges with these methods:
Outdated and inaccurate maps:
The site plans they used didn’t show the latest changes, often including features or infrastructure that no longer existed or had changed.
Difficulty in having a map that’s to-scale:
It’s hard to know what fits in your event site. Placing infrastructure needed for the event accurately was difficult without having to do many site visits, which added extra costs and delays.
Inability to clearly mark emergency locations:
With the previous ways of planning, there wasn’t a way to precisely mark the locations of key event areas such as the Lost Child point, Event Control, First Aid, Vehicle Access Routes, and Emergency Evacuation Areas, which are critical for safety and operational success.
Non-specialized Event Planning tools:
Minor adjustments in layout planning tools, such as moving small objects in Microsoft Word, could lead to disruptions and inconsistencies across the entire document, complicating the planning process.
Where OnePlan Comes In
The City of Greater Dandenong recognized that traditional event planning methods were becoming obsolete in our digital world and were looking for an innovative way to plan their events. OnePlan transformed the way the Dandenong City Council planned and executed its events.
Overall, the Events team have saved time and money by using OnePlan. The platform provided:
- Accurate and up-to-date site plans, saving money by ensuring precise placements and GPS points for necessary infrastructure.
- A significant reduction in the frequency of site visits, freeing up time for other critical tasks.
- Enhanced stakeholder relationships, with contractors appreciating the clarity of the site maps provided.
- Improved coordination with emergency services, particularly in planning and executing safe fireworks displays.
“We’ve used OnePlan for the past year, and it has been really beneficial,” said Patrick. One great tool we’ve used is zoning off areas, since these maps go to all our contractors, and stallholders, and even a version of the map goes out to the public.”
The team has also found value in OnePlan’s smart calculator tools, like measuring an area.
“For our New Year’s Eve fireworks, we needed to set a safe exclusion zone, and OnePlan’s measuring tool was invaluable. It saved us from making numerous site visits or using inaccurate maps.”
Patrick Mageean
Festivals and Events Officer, City of Greater Dandenong
The next major event on their calendar, the Springvale Snow Fest, is an all-day affair with snow play areas complete with real snow transported from Mt. Bullet, fireworks, and a vibrant stage program. Planning this complex event has been made smoother with OnePlan, enabling the team to efficiently manage logistics and ensure a spectacular experience for all attendees.
Better Event Planning
Reflecting on their OnePlan journey, Patrick Mageean shares, “OnePlan can easily be described as an Event Planner’s dream. You have all the tools to clearly display your event – better site plans are created in less time with more time allowed to create the wow factor!”
OnePlan has transformed event planning within the Greater Dandenong City Council, setting a new standard tool to use for their planning. Adopting OnePlan by the Dandenong City Council’s Festivals and Events Unit illustrates a forward-thinking approach to community event planning. By leveraging innovative tools, the team not only enhanced operational efficiency but also bettered the community experience, making each event safe and successful.
