Tips for Planning a Successful Corporate Event

Organizing a successful corporate event can be very tricky. There are many decisions that go into planning a corporate event for your company, from searching the right venue and determining the perfect menu to deciding the theme and planning activities of the event. Planning these essential details of a corporate event is not easy and if you don’t pay attention to the details, it can easily turn into your worst nightmare.

At the day of the event, guests may be left starving because you didn’t order the right amount of food or they may get bored because you failed to plan activities that would keep them entertained. Therefore, it is important that you focus on every little detail of a corporate event to make sure that it is a success!

Corporate events are not an easy beast to tame on your own and it is best to work with a professional event planner to make an event successful. A professional event planner is experienced and can focus on all the details of a corporate event to make it a success. But, if you wish to go solo, then follow the advice of experts to make sure that you don’t miss any aspect of planning. In this post, we’ve compiled a list of tips to help you plan a successful corporate event.

Tip#1: Define Your Event’s Purpose

Although this point is pretty obvious, but many people miss out on this and often fail to define the purpose of their event before moving to planning. So, the first thing you must do is formulate the goal of your event: do you wish to convey information about your company to participants; express your gratitude to shareholders or want to raise funds? The answer will decide your event’s format. By format we mean, the theme of the event, its duration and timing, catering, the venue’s layout and sound.

Make sure you don’t get stuck with traditional formats. Search for different formats online and decide the one that perfectly aligns with the purpose/goal of your event.

Tip#2: Pay Attention to Planning

The planning of your event should include logistics and promotion. Create a detailed event planning document that contains the tasks assigned to each member of the event and make it available to all members, so that they can understand the whole plan.

List down the most important tasks of the event and then break them down into specific steps to make it easy for your team members to understand them. The timeframe is critical component of event planning that should define the time in which each task must be completed by each team member. You must make sure that all team members are completing the tasks on time; otherwise, the preparation will slow down.

Tip#3: Pay Attention to Details

If you really want to give your guests a pleasant surprise, think about all the details of your event: how will the participants be greeted and who will greet them, what songs will be played, who will attend the event, who will give presentations and what will the guests be doing during breaks.

Do your best to create that wow effect in your event that makes it different from mainstream events.

Tip#4: Draft the Budget for Your Event

Once you have decided the important tasks of your event and the details, reflect them in the budget of your event. It is important to have a reserve to tackle unforeseeable situations. Imagine this: you picked an open location for your corporate event and it started to rain on the day of your event. In this case, you will have to immediately change the venue and transport everything there. You must plan for these unexpected situations in advance and should always keep a reserve to shift the location of your event.

Tip#5: Check the Venue & Have a Backup Plan

Visit the venue to check it yourself and ensure that everything is in order. We’ve heard many stories from guests about poorly planned events where the air conditioner stopped working in the middle of the event or the stage broke and the presenter suffered injuries. Therefore, make sure to check these kinds of issues before the big day of your event.

Tip#6: Allocate Responsibilities to Your Team Members

The tasks should not only be distributed among the team members during the stage of preparation, but you must also assign different roles to your members during the corporate event. Allocate responsibilities to each team member by zone. Make someone responsible for greeting your guests, assign a different person for catering, give the responsibility of handling equipment to another person, etc. Every team member must have his/her own zone, which he/she will manage during the event.

Tip#7: Promote the Event

A lot of time is required to successfully promote a corporate event; therefore you should not underestimate this and should begin promotion of your event early. The target audience of your event, its type, resources and the allocated budget will determine your approach for marketing. Choose the media partners that focus on your target audience. It’s best to work with a few partners that target your audience, rather than promote the event through different sources. Craft one key message for your audience that’ll be promoted through all marketing channels.

Tip#8: Focus on the Service

Make it clear to your team members that no matter what the circumstances are, they must stay friendly with guests, participants and partners. They must address the questions and problems of the guests, even if they are tired and things aren’t going as planned. What people will remember from your event is the atmosphere and how well they were treated, not the food or the words of the speaker.

Tip#9: Make Sure to Complete a Final Check

Once you’ve planned out everything, it is time for a final check. Make sure all the guests have been invited, the audio, video or printed content is ready and the stage is set. Check to ensure that all the team members understand their responsibilities and tasks. Draft a checklist to check for all the preparations and if anything is out of order, look into it personally and do the needful before the event.

Tip#10: Photograph Everything

Photograph the memorable times of your event and post them online on social media platforms to promote your brand. If you can afford a professional photographer, then hire one as he/she can better capture your event. Ask the photographer to prepare photos for event branding and capture lots of photos of your guests so that they can keep memories of their great time at your event.

Tip#11: Get Online

A corporate event can be used to improve your online presence. On Twitter, create a hashtag for your event and encourage your guests to tweet about their experience at your event. Similarly, post photos of your guests on your Facebook page and encourage them to tag themselves.

Tip#12: Request Feedback

You planned out everything and the event progressed without any issue, but you don’t know if the guests enjoyed their time or not. That’s why it is important to ask participants for feedback so that you can evaluate your event and make better arrangements in future. Provide an evaluation form to your guests when the event is about to end and ask them to rate different aspects of your event. This information from your guests will help you avoid mistakes with events in future.

These are all the things you need to focus on to make your next corporate event a success. We know what you are thinking right now: so many things to take care of, how can you focus on all the important details of a corporate event when you have never even planned a single event in your life? Scroll back to the beginning of the post and read what we said: it is best to work with a professional event planner for corporate events.

The reason we said it is because planning a corporate event is not simple and if you miss any important detail of the event, it will be ruined and you will end up disappointing your guests. Therefore, when you decide to arrange a corporate event, always hire a professional event planner to take care of the planning while you enjoy your time at the event and attend to your guests.

At The Great Event, we consider it our responsibility to plan successful corporate events for our clients. We have been producing cutting edge events for Fortune 500 companies and national organizations since 1987. Give us the opportunity to deliver Diamond Certified customer service tailored to specific needs of your company. You can either have your committee work with us or leave everything to our professional event planners and they’ll take care of all the important aspects of your corporate event. To book our services for your corporate event, call us at 408-298-3001.

Image Credits
by kasto – yayimages.com