Success hinges on a seven-step process that spans from defining clear objectives and securing a venue to managing registrations and gathering participant feedback for future improvements.
Meg Breithaupt
February 25, 2026
So you’re thinking about putting on a workshop. You have a broad concept of what you want to teach and an idea of who you want to teach it to. But maybe you’re a little stuck on where to go next.
How do you get the word about your workshop? What's the easiest way to manage registration and attendance? And what structure should the workshop follow?
This article answers those questions and more. It walks you through seven important and tangible steps that detail exactly how to create a workshop and market it to your audience. It also provides a series of helpful workshop planning tips so that you and your attendees get the most out of your upcoming event.
Ready to dig into designing and promoting your own workshop? The following steps will help guide you through the process. We suggest you scan them to get a broad understanding of the process and then head back to step one for support putting what you learn into action.
Begin actualizing your workshop idea by clearly defining its goals and purpose. This will help set a good foundation for the aspects of planning that follow, including choosing a suitable venue and setting up registration and ticketing.
You can think about workshop objectives from two perspectives:
What you want your attendees to get out of the workshop
What you want to get out of the workshop
For the first, framing your initiatives as learning outcomes is helpful. For instance, if you’re teaching a management workshop, your learning outcomes might include:
Understanding and applying effective decision-making frameworks
Demonstrating techniques to handle workplace conflicts constructively
Developing the ability to assign tasks with clarity and set expectations effectively
Then, consider what you want to gain from running the workshop. For example, one of the main purposes may be financial, such as generating certain earnings from ticket sales.
Others may want to host a free workshop as a lead-generating activity for their consulting services. In this case, the goal of the workshop is to form new relationships and find potential customers.
With your goals established, you can start thinking about the audience your workshop will serve.
In some cases, this will be fairly obvious. If you’re running a glass-blowing class, the expected attendees will be people interested in learning the art of glass-blowing.
Other scenarios might require more narrowing down. For instance, you could target the management workshop mentioned in the previous step to junior managers who’ve stepped into a management role within the last 12 months. You could also tailor it to more experienced senior leaders and C-suite executives.
Understanding the audience your workshop will be speaking to not only helps you develop appropriate materials and content but also allows you to refine your targeting when it comes to attracting potential attendees.
The next step in your action plan should be to start looking for suitable venues for your event.
If you’re running an in-person workshop, there are a number of considerations to bear in mind, including:
The location of the venue (ensuring it's close and easily accessible for your target audience)
The capacity of the space (allowing you to comfortably fit the anticipated group size)
The amenities provided (such as projectors, audiovisual equipment, tables, breakout rooms, Wi-Fi, and catering options)
The cost of using the venue (making sure it fits within your budget)
Some of these considerations will still be similar for virtual events and webinars, such as the cost of the online event software and the maximum number of guests it can support. Other practical considerations when choosing a software solution to host an online workshop include:
How user-friendly the interface is
Necessary features and functionality like screen sharing and whiteboarding capabilities
The platform’s data security protocols
How much training and support the provider can offer
Step four is to move on from some of the more operational aspects of creating a workshop to considering what the workshop will teach. Work backward from your goals and learning outcomes, starting with a brainstorming session to note the individual topics you need to cover.
Let’s take the learning outcome “Demonstrating techniques to handle workplace conflicts constructively” as an example. For participants to achieve this goal, you could break the intended outcome into topics such as:
Understanding and identifying types of conflicts
Conflict resolution models
Deescalating aggressive situations
From there, structure your subtopics into a logical flow. For example, workshop attendees might learn about the different kinds of conflicts, their causes, and how to identify them before moving on to strategies for resolving conflict.
Once you have decided on the broad structure of the workshop, you can start thinking about the content types you’ll use to teach each section, how to integrate interactive elements, and which types of mid-session check-ins you’ll use to ensure participants are progressing and nobody is getting left behind.
Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far, you’ve got a workshop planned and ready to deliver. Now, you just need to confirm your attendees.
Before you dive into promotion and marketing activities, make sure you have a secure and functioning solution for managing attendee registration. There are a few ways to do this.
One of the most common methods is to sell tickets to the workshop. With platforms like EventCreate, you can create multiple ticket tiers to increase revenue and use personalized coupons to promote sales.
If you’re not selling tickets, you can use an event registration solution to capture attendee details. EventCreate has your back here as well. With our unified event management platform, you can send professional event invites to your guest list, use customizable forms to capture participant details, and track RSVPs in real time.
Once you’ve got an event website set up, it's time to get the word out about your next workshop.
Some of the best ways to promote your in-person or virtual workshop include:
Sharing posts or running ads on social media
Sending out personalized invitations to an email list
Creating event pages on local community boards and social media groups
Partnering with influencers to expand your reach
Leveraging a referral program
The final step in the workshop planning process is to double-check that all of your workshop content is in order and finalize any logistics, such as:
Sending ticket holders details on when to arrive and where to park
Confirming critical amenities at your event venue are present, such as a projector or whiteboard
Performing a run-through of the workshop agenda and making last-minute changes or adjustments
You set clear workshop goals, developed an agenda, found a venue, and started selling tickets. What else can you do from here to ensure your workshop runs smoothly?
There’s little that's less inspiring than showing up as a guest to a workshop where the presenter does little more than read a set of slides.
To keep your workshop as engaging as possible, make use of plenty of interactive elements, such as:
Icebreakers and warm-up activities to encourage participation and conversation
Group discussions where a question is posed and each small group must come up with their own answers
Hands-on activities with physical components, such as a “try it for yourself” session
Simulations with real-life situations or role-playing scenarios
For online workshops, implement interactive elements like polls, quizzes, live Q&As, shared whiteboards, and digital breakout rooms.
Workshop scheduling is about more than just allocating a given amount of time to each conversation point or topic to be covered. Instead, effective workshop facilitators must also be attentive to how the event is progressing as they are running workshops.
It's not uncommon or unexpected for things to go a little off track. A session you had scheduled to take 40 minutes might quickly extend to an hour if there is a lot of engaging conversation and questions.
In this case, you need to think on your feet and have ideas of other topics to shorten or speed up so that the session doesn’t go over time.
One of the best ways to make sure your workshops stay on schedule is to ensure everybody involved knows what the schedule is.
Send out your agenda in advance so attendees have an idea of what to expect. Then, spend 5 minutes early in the workshop explaining the agenda and the importance of keeping to the allotted time slots to ensure all content gets covered.
An important reason that professionals attend corporate events and workshops in the first place is for networking opportunities. This is especially true for younger participants, with 73% of Gen Z stating that networking opportunities are what they find most interesting about business events.
Yes, workshop participants are there to learn, but they’re also there to build connections with industry leaders, topic experts, and like-minded individuals. Networking often takes place during breaks, like morning coffee or lunch, but you might also want to include a more formal networking session if you feel it's especially important to your audience.
For example, you could schedule a 90-minute break midday, with 30 minutes for lunch and the remaining hour open for active networking.
If your goal is to put on the best, most engaging, and insightful workshop possible, you need to ask for participant feedback and integrate it into future sessions.
Some workshop hosts like to do this at the end of the workshop, though you may find that many are reluctant to speak up and give constructive criticism.
Instead, sending a follow-up email after the workshop might be better. In this email, you can request long-form feedback or include a link to an easy-to-complete survey to increase response rates.
By setting clear goals and takeaways, employing an experienced workshop leader with solid problem-solving skills, and performing a good amount of workshop preparation, you can put on a memorable event that will have attendees walking away feeling proud they learned new skills.
Whether you’re planning a workshop as part of a conference, fundraising event, or simply as a means to teach a topic you’re passionate about, EventCreate is stacked with tools to help you create the perfect event, including:
Dozens of pre-designed website templates
A free QR ticket scanning and event check-in app
Now that you’ve learned how to create a workshop, it's time to dive in! Sign up for EventCreate for free today.
Highly-rated and thousands of reviews worldwide, EventCreate is independently ranked a top event management platform.
