What to put in an event brief, and what can come later

An event brief needs eight things. What the event is for, the date or the window, a headcount, whether there is a stage moment, the room or the fact that you have not chosen one, what time you can get into that room, a budget range, and who signs it off. Everything past that is detail a supplier will ask for. Leave one of the eight out and you still get quotes back. You get quotes you cannot compare, because each supplier filled the gap with a different guess.

It is the cheapest document in the event, whatever you are running, and it decides more of what follows than anything after it.

Why does a vague brief get you worse options?

Because a supplier cannot price an unknown. They can only assume one, and each of them assumes differently.

Send a brief with no headcount to four companies and four quotes come back built on four different crowds. You end up comparing arithmetic instead of judgement, and nothing in the pile tells you who understood the event.

The quieter cost is that vagueness on your side is risk on theirs, and risk gets priced. Anyone holding a loose brief quotes the version that cannot embarrass them later, which is the expensive one.

A vague brief does not buy you flexible quotes. It buys four quotes that each solved a different event.

Which lines actually drive the price?

Three, and they are the ones most often left blank on briefs that reach us.

The headcount band. Not the final number, the band. Crew, catering and floor area step up at thresholds rather than sliding, so a supplier needs to know which side of one you are on. Between 150 and 200 does that job. A blank does not.

Whether there is a stage moment. A room where people eat and talk is one event. The same room with six minutes of speeches or a reveal in the middle is another, and it changes the AV, the crew and the shape of the evening. One line covers it, even before the segment is written.

What time you can get into the room. The line people are most surprised to be asked for. It sets how much can be built, which sets what can be designed, and it lives on the venue's contract rather than yours. Find it before the brief goes out.

What do you write when you do not know yet?

You write that you do not know, and then you write what you do know instead. Missing information does not stop a quote. Unmarked missing information does.

Set the four lines below to where you actually are. Underneath is the brief you could send today: what is firm, what will move, and the line to write in each.

Should the budget be in it?

Yes, and a range does the job.

A budget is not a statement of what you are willing to part with. It is the instruction that decides which options get put in front of you at all. Without one, a supplier guesses which tier you are shopping in, and there is no neutral guess.

With a range they can say what fits inside it, and what would have to move for the event you described to happen. Naming a figure does not commit you to spending it. Naming nothing buys three rounds of proposals aimed at the wrong bracket.

What does "we are flexible on the date" usually mean?

One specific week, most of the time.

Almost every brief that says flexible has a shape underneath that never got written down. A quarter it has to land in. A holiday to dodge. A room free on only two Fridays. While it stays in your head, somebody proposes the wrong week and a round of emails goes on finding out why.

So write the shape instead of the date. Any Friday in March, not the last week, tells a supplier where crew and rooms can be found. A date picked to look decisive does not.

What should come back?

A quote with the working shown, and a shape for the day.

That is the other half of this, and worth reading first. What an event quote covers is what arrives in reply, and reading it backwards shows what your brief forgot to say. If the room is still open, choosing it by what the event has to do moves a quote more than picking between suppliers does. And that one line about a stage moment becomes the sixty lines of a run of show.

None of this asks you to have the event worked out. It asks the brief to say which parts are decided, so the rest gets priced as open instead of guessed at.