For city teams weighing a major event opportunity
How to land the
right major events.
The opportunities you put into the bidding funnel matter as much as the bids themselves. This is the qualification stage that comes before the bid, written out in full.
Scroll↓
01 / The problem
A city can spend months on an opportunity before the basic questions are answered.
A federation calls. A local partner has been talking to someone. A politician saw the event abroad last summer and came back with an idea.
None of it arrives as a decision. It arrives as interest. And interest is not free.
The calendar fills, a deck gets built, numbers appear. Nobody has said yes, and nobody has said no, and the city is already working on the event.
By then the opportunity has supporters, and changing course costs something. So it keeps going, on evidence nobody has tested.
before the bid.
If we had known this earlier, we would have gone after a different event.
A sentence I have heard in more than one city. Always late, and always after the money.
02 / The funnel
Winning the right events starts at the top of the funnel.
Your city has this funnel whether anyone drew it or not. What you let into it decides what you can win, and what you can deliver afterwards.
03 / The question
Is this the right one
to go after?
Most cities go straight to the first question. It is the more exciting one. It is also the wrong one to start with, because it assumes the answer to the second.
The first discipline of event strategy is not bid writing. It is bid filtering. Strong cities do not just know how to chase events. They know how to qualify them, and then they win the ones they chase.
04 / Where it breaks
The problem is rarely the decision. It is everything before it.
When I map a city's bidding funnel, the failures cluster in the middle. Not at the board meeting. In the weeks nobody owns.
Wrong events get in
Five processes, not one
Steps are missing
The work lives in spreadsheets
The team is in the dark
No gate that can stop it
05 / Where this came from
I built it because I needed it.
I have sat on both sides of this in Lahti. On the city side, and inside the city's event company. Opportunities kept arriving, more than we could ever host, and someone had to work out which ones were real.
So I built a way to qualify them. Score the fit. Check the rights holder. Test the venues honestly. Put the economics on the table before the enthusiasm did. It ran on spreadsheets for years, and it worked, but only when I was the one running it.
Then I stepped out on my own and rebuilt the whole thing as one workspace, so a city team can run it without me in the room. Same logic, tightened.
06 / The method
Ten steps. Two gates. Seven days.
Steps 1 to 5 test whether the opportunity stands up at all. Steps 7 to 9 turn the findings into an economic and decision case. Steps 6 and 10 are the gates, and either one can end it on paper.
Swipe the cards →
Strategic fit
Rights holder trust check
Local organiser reality check
Ecosystem readiness
Venue fit scorecard
Gate one
Feasibility report
Desk research
Real economic impact
City cost and benefit
Gate two
Go / No-Go pack
Take this with you. The ten steps are the useful part, and you can run them in a spreadsheet like I did for years. The order is what matters. Fit before economics. Evidence before verdict. A gate that can actually stop the work.
If your own process already covers all ten in that order, you do not need anything from me. In most cities it covers six of them, in a different order, in four different files.
07 / The decision
Four answers, not two.
The method ends in a recommendation leadership can act on. Yes or no is where most bid discussions get stuck. Four verdicts break the deadlock, because two of them let a city keep an opportunity alive without committing to it.
08 / What it produces
The pack writes itself from the work.
Nothing is re-typed at the end. Every score, gap, condition and number entered along the way lands in the reports.
The whole assessment on one screen. Progress, the current signal computed from steps 1 to 5, open conditions and how many have no owner, and the board date it has to be ready for.
Scored, not argued. Zero, one or two on every row, weighted, with an evidence link required for a two.
Venues side by side. Eight domains, upgrade needs with early cost signals, and an owner on every gap.
Export it and make it yours. Word or PDF, into your own city template, in your own language.
Test it yourself
Two cities, fully qualified, nothing to fill in.
A 30-day culture festival across 40 venues. A 12-day world championships with an 8 million euro venue investment and real guarantee exposure. Every verdict, condition, number and report already there.
No account. No card. No form.
Questions, or want to see it on your own opportunity? Reply to my email, or email me here, and I will send times for twenty minutes.
Ready to run it yourself? 7-day free trial, then €997 + VAT a year for 5 users. See how it works and start the trial →