How to Increase Turnout at Your Next Event
Darryl Scotti 1 October 2018
Imagine spending countless hours planning an event. On the day of the event, majority of the guests who agreed to attend your event don’t show up. Seeing empty chairs at the event you planned can be demoralizing. Moreover, low attendance can affect the reputation of your company and may impact your future events. Therefore, it is important for you to increase turnout at your event.
When it comes to increasing turnout, selling the value of the event to potential attendees is the first issue. Once you have invited the guests and received confirmation of attendance from them, the next obstacle is to actually get them to the event. Illness, poor weather, traffic, family-related issues, appointments and work are a few things that can stand between your event and the attendee. While these things cannot be avoided, key strategies to improve turnout at an event will increase your chances of getting more guests attend to your event.
In this post, we’ll highlight a few tactics that can help you boost turnout at your next event.
1. Choose a Location That’s Easily Accessible and Memorable
Attendees are driven away from a corporate event when the venue is too far away and not easily reachable. Therefore, you should find a place that is convenient and easily accessible for majority of your guests. Furthermore, make sure that the location is distinctive and memorable to set your corporate event apart.
The design of your venue should be relevant to your event. For instance, a ballroom or hotel may be an ideal choice for a gala dinner or cocktail function, while corporate conferences are better when organized in a convention centre. Your event location affects the overall theme of your corporate event and affects how attendees perceive your event.
2. Don’t Try to Compete with Other Events
If someone else is planning a big event at the exact date or time as your event, then you should move your event to another date. If you try to compete with another event, both your event and the other event will suffer as turnout will be low at both. However, if many of your potential attendees have already agreed to attend the event and the other event was announced after you had made all the planning, then you shouldn’t move your event to another date.
3. Hold the Event on a Date That Works for Your Attendees
The date and time of the event can make all the difference for guest attendance. For example, seminars are mostly conducted in morning while evening time is great for networking or appreciation events. Meetings should not be conducted on Saturday or Sunday as most people have other priorities on weekends.
4. Simplify the Process of Registration
Attendees hate online registrations that take too much time to complete. If you have no other option besides using online registrations for your event, make sure that the forms are easy to fill. Don’t include many fields in the form. Only ask for basic information of the guests like their name, contact information and email address.
5. Compile a Guest List
If you want to increase turnout at your corporate event, compile a proper guest list that includes name, email address and contact information of appropriate attendees. Once you have a guest list with important information of the attendees, you can easily send invites via email or phone.
6. Invite the Guests
In order to achieve a great turnout at your event, you must invite people early and follow up. Send invitations to people at least a month before your event and send confirmations to people who have agreed to attend the event. Sending a reminder just before the actual date of the event is a good idea as there is a possibility that some of your guests may have forgotten about the event. You can use printed invitations or opt for email invitations, depending on your attendees.
7. Consider Personal Invitations
Although physical invitations are a good way to invite guests, they should not be considered a substitute for personal invitations. You should personally extend invitations to colleagues, friends and acquaintances. Many hosts ignore sending personal invitations just because they don’t want to spend time calling potential attendees and asking them to attend the event. However, if you want increased turnout at your event, you should not ignore sending personal invitations to guests.
8. Build Your Agenda Early
In order to increase turnout at your event, you must create an event that’s worth attending. You should focus the agenda of your event on a single theme to ensure that guests are not overwhelmed, but there should also be enough variety to keep the attendees interested. Once you have built your agenda, communicate it to your attendees so that they know exactly what to expect from your event.
9. Entertainment Should be Included
If your event is longer than four hours, you should build entertainment into the event agenda to give some fun time to your guests. Attendees will get tired from speaker sessions or seminars. Entertainment included in the event will allow them to relax. A few entertainment options you may consider for your event include hiring a comedian or magician, circus show, fire performers, celebrity impersonators and break dancers.
10. Use Appropriate Tools
Using the right tools to target your attendees is the key to increasing turnout at your event. For instance, if you wish to attract association leaders or business executives, then personalized emails would be perfect. If you take the time to personalize the email message, it will show to them that you value their presence. If you wish to target young professionals, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter will help you create buzz and attract younger attendees.
11. Cross Promote Your Event
When you’re promoting your event, contact organizations which can help you reach out to more attendees and offer them incentives to promote your event. You could sponsor their products or services at your event or invite them to your event.
12. Tell Your Guests About Multiple Value Propositions
Highlight as many benefits of attending your event as you can when you are promoting it to your potential attendees or sending invites to your guests. Include in your event invitations, the important things guests will learn from attending your event, entertainment or keynote speakers, companies that will be attending the event and any other benefit that is relevant to the guests.
13. Include Incentives For Early Registrations
You should offer early-bird discounts to compel people to register early for your event. In addition to early-bird discounts, you can also consider giving discount coupons, books or other incentives to people who register early.
14. Ask Attendees to Promote Your Event
Another way to promote your event and potentially increase turnout is to ask attendees to tell others about your event. Offer incentives and discounts for spreading the word and bringing more guests to your event. Also encourage your speakers to promote your event to their audience.
Getting a great turnout at a corporate event isn’t easy. However, if you want to make your event successful, it is essential to have a large number of guests attend your event. Your event won’t be successful if you can’t get a large number of guests to show up at the event. Therefore, it is essential that you follow the strategies highlighted above to increase the turnout at your next event. If you are struggling to promote your event, send invitations to the guests, choose the right location for your event, build an agenda for your event or plan entertainment, then leave all these things in the highly capable hands of a professional event planner. Professional event planners can make all the arrangements for your event including selecting the venue, choosing the right entertainment and inviting all the guests to the event.
Hire a professional event planner from the Great Event for your next event. We’ve produced cutting edge events for Fortune 500 companies and national organization since 1987.
Our professional event planner will get those seats filled at your event. We will choose an appropriate venue for your event and make all the other important arrangements. To increase turnout at your event, we will promote your event among potential attendees and invite your guests on your behalf. We’ll build an agenda for your event early on and communicate it to all your guests.
Contact us for more information about event planning.