With the current pandemic, many businesses and organizations have had to cancel events that they had planned on holding and may have already gotten vendors for, sold tickets, or paid for. When this happens, it can be hard to know where to start for walking things back and trying to make the situation right for everyone involved.
To help you in figuring this out, here are three tips for cancelling a business event due to the pandemic.
Address Your Cancellation Policy
Even before the pandemic, you likely thought about how you’d handle cancellations, whether they were on your side or on the side of your vendors or patrons. So before you reach out to anyone about your event, the Better Business Bureau recommends that you review the cancellation policy that you had in place. Then, you’ll be able to see if and how you might need to alter that policy to fit your current needs.
In some situations, you may be able to reschedule your event for some future time. In this case, you might want to consider voiding and reissuing tickets without refunding them. However, if your event is cancelled completely and you’re needing to start from scratch in the future, you might want to add something to your updated cancellation policy about how you plan to handle things.
Do Your Best To Reassure Attendees
When you’re needing to cancel an event, there will be a lot of different people that you need to address and make things right with. As part of this, EventPlanner.net recommends that you do whatever it takes to reassure your vendors and guests.
To make things easier on yourself, you may want to create a FAQ page on your website where you address some of the most common problems that your vendors and guests will face. With your answers, try to be as honest and transparent about what’s going on, how you can help, and what you may still be trying to figure out at this point. Also, try to make yourself available for any additional questions or problems.
Seek A Compromise With Your Vendors
If this is an event that you’ve held before and you have a lot of return vendors you were planning to work with, Claire Hoffman, a contributor to BizBash.com, shares that you may want to seek some kind of compromise with them so that both of your businesses don’t take a huge hit because of this. Depending on your exact circumstances, you might find that you and your vendors can be much more flexible than you’ve been in the past.
If an event you’ve planned has needed to be cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you navigate through this mess.
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