In a corporate environment, activities are conducted to communicate business strategy, alter internal business behaviour, launch a product or service, inspire, train or reward employees, or influence consumers' external behaviour towards the brand.
They bring company employees together in many ways, help more extensive marketing or sales campaigns, stimulate team successes, or entertain senior leaders.
What is a Corporate Event?
Yet, organising corporate activities goes beyond meeting planning. The conferences and meetings include the largest chunk of the workload. The other events include corporate hospitality, consumer entertainment, conventions, exhibits, and events for employees including incentive travel reward schemes, team building, motivational events, receptions, parties, and charity fundraising days.
It's no easy task to organise and conduct an extraordinary corporate event. Usually, it's a months-long process consisting of several phases and a range of organisational steps.
Types of Corporate Events
Corporate activities can range from business conferences and internal training sessions to out-days for customers’ teams and hospitality. Therefore, it is best to measure them in terms of their scale when preparing for some form of corporate case.
- Micro-events are organised for up to 100 delegates, often taking meetings or more informal training sessions. These micro-events planning specifications can simply be a room reservation, presentation facilities, break-out refreshments, and registration.
- Small events are classified as being between 100 delegates and 250. They may be lectures, days of training or conferences in the department. A main stage itinerary and many break-out sessions, along with lunch, refreshments, audio-visual facilities, online registration, and transport, can need to be handled by planners.
- Midsize events are more technologically dependent. It can be company-wide conferences with up to 1,000 delegates or leadership summits to meet senior executives’ essential clients. The budgetary concerns should all include a branded website, pre-event correspondence, and an event mobile app. Delegates can have accommodation in hotels, plus transport that takes participants to and from the venue. As part of a complicated multi-stream conference itinerary, a pre-or post-event reception or evening entertainment may be needed.
- Large-scale activities also involve managing components such as hotel room bookings, delegation flights, budgets, and online registration of business technology software. There may be multi-day events so you may need offsite activities, dinners, partner services, an award ceremony, or other complicated itinerary preparation. It will be necessary to carefully arrange personnel, catering, registration, speaker and delegate management on a scale. For instance, conventions can attract up to about 10,000 attendees and can last for a few days.
Top 5 Unwritten Rules for Organizing Corporate Event
Organising a successful business event enables you to demonstrate your brand’s prestige, improve your competitiveness and attract new partners, investors and clients. Nevertheless, for all of this to succeed, you first need to learn how to create a corporate event and make it accomplish all of its key goals.
With this in mind and without further ado, here are the top 5 unwritten rules you should be aware of.
1. Create an Agenda
You need to be clear before you even begin that you, yourself, understand the reason for hosting this event. It might showcase your newest product, do some networking, draw investors or something completely different. You also need to understand that your success at fulfilling this agenda requires SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) goals. In other words, from your point of view, setting an abstract and emotional (something that you can't predict the rise of the) objective is undoubtedly a bad idea.
2. Create a Guest List and Send invitations
The guest list and invites are other things you need to worry about. It needs to happen early on, as the mere number of participants determines the size of the location you need to find, the choice of catering and so much more for the event. You may also decide if it is an open event, a plus-one form of event, or whether participation is limited to individuals who are invited only. You can begin sending out the invites once you have this worked out.
3. Make a Budget
As soon as you have the number of participants to see what you can afford, you can make a budget. Getting catering and a venue is essential, but there is no need to stop here. You may also hire a team to record and photograph the event and plan any additional costs involved in the activities you are looking for. For instance, you may decide to hand out corporate awards to your team’s most valuable members or even outsider contributors (investors, suppliers or partners). It too is something to consider.
4. Check for the Schedule of your Competitors
Hosting an event simultaneously as your rivals in more than one way will damage your business. First of all, inside your niche, you stand to build a strong opponent. Second, you can lower your event attendance theoretically. You don't stand to win something tangible, in other words, and you stand to lose quite a bit. Fortunately, this is something that can be avoided with just a bit of scheduling.
5. Create a False Sense of Urgency
Finally, there is a reason why individuals are so attracted to limited-time offers, often for goods, events and services they don't need. The false sense of urgency appeals to their subconscious desire to get the best deal out of the situation. In other words, sending an email that discusses your event does not make people want to attend as much as showing a vast countdown clock on your home page. Furthermore, you can remind people of time running out over your social media profiles, thus maximising this technique’s reach.
How to Plan a Corporate Event?
Any organisation that wants to create enduring partnerships needs to know how professional events are produced. It is crucial to approach each meeting to understand the five-event management elements: analysis, design, preparation, coordination and assessment, whether you are hosting a product launch for 300 people or an employee training for 15. It is much easier to conceptualise and put together the many moving parts required to bring it to life if an event is broken up into these manageable phases.
Corporate events allow individuals to engage personally and build genuine ties in an increasingly digital world. As a result, it has become more critical than ever to host corporate events. According to marketers surveyed, live events are currently the most successful platform for achieving business goals as part of a new event marketing benchmark and trends study.
Events offer a personal way for companies to develop partnerships with their target audiences[as well as] create brand awareness and loyalty. The meaningful interactions made by in-person contact can not be replaced by LinkedIn texts, Facebook status updates and tweets.
Hosting a corporate collaboration allows you to improve partnerships with existing customers and partners and draw new ones. Here are ten tips on how to arrange an event that your participants will not soon forget.
1. Understand the Purpose of your Event
Your first step is to determine what you plan to achieve once you decide to host an event. Before you can do something else, it is crucial to know the event’s goals and objectives that you are trying to create. Start by asking yourself why and what you expect from the event that you are hosting. If you have defined your goals and aspirations, you can determine what sort of event will resonate with your target audience. Think of it as an immersive brand experience that you have, instead of thinking of it as just a corporate meeting. You've got to make it meaningful and attractive.
2. Set a Realistic Budget
You need to know how much money you have to work with to determine what kind of event you can create. You should decide early about how much you want to invest, and they expect at least 10 per cent more to spend. Things are always changing, and you should have a cushion for added and unexpected expenses that pop up. If you have a budget, knowing where to allocate a lot of your money is crucial.
3. Establish a Project Timeline
The event design helps to keep track of a wide variety of activities. Establishing a master comprehensive checklist, can be encouraged. New, tech-savvy instruments are available that streamline and simplify the management of dozens, if not hundreds, of tiny data.
The complete planning checklist serves as a guideline for the remainder of the planning process. To keep your inventory on track, create a spreadsheet and use individual tabs for each form of event, such as venue, speakers, schedule, plan and travel. In this way, you can list each operation or task, the individuals responsible for each part of the process, and all the relevant deadlines.
4. Decide on your Audience
Defining the target group is an integral part of the planning phase. When you can name your audience, their desires and preferences can be catered to by the software.
5. Choose a Theme and Format
After you have set your goals and established the audience, it is time to select a theme or subject for the event and decide the best presentation style.
6. Select an Appropriate Location
It's time to find a location that allows you to bring your vision to life once you determine the type of event you'd like to build. At times, it's tempting to leap ahead and book a venue that you've heard good things about or that you know an up-and-coming hot spot, even though you haven't honed your event's mission very well.
7. Plan the Logistics of the Day
You will need to find, evaluate and appoint all the required event experts to have a successful event, and better convey the ideas you would like to circulate during the meeting. Determine a timeline for the day to ensure everything goes according to your schedule, and make sure everyone on your team knows what aspects of the day they are responsible for handling.
8. Promote your Event
No one will turn up if people don't know about your event, so finding innovative ways of getting the word out is essential. You can simply send out invites for a small event with a restricted guest list, but you need to be bolder for larger events. You can promote yourself on social media from there and have your team spread the word. Build a website for an event or, at least, a new landing page on your current site. Promotional images, guest blog posts, and updates from Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, may also be part of the social media marketing. Maintain continuity by using the same site handle and hashtag and consistent messaging, so it is always clear that the buzz is about one particular event.
9. Make Use of Technology
The days of cumbersome mile-long lists to track all of an event's moving parts are gone. There are plenty of event management software tools and applications today that do everything from offering seamless on-site check-in of participants to improving the attractiveness of simulation and virtual reality games workshops and presentations.
The use of event apps will allow you to simplify preparation and increase participation among participants dramatically. Event management software keeps the project on track, but it also makes it easier to collaborate with suppliers and other innovative partners in collaboration.
10. Celebrate and Evaluate your Event Planning Success
If your event goes off without a hitch, you're not done yet. Now is the time to complete any loose ends, such as giving suppliers final payments, reconciling your finances and holding a debrief with your team after the case.
You need to collect input from visitors, most importantly. You can use it to ask questions from attendees if you have used an event planning app with a feedback function. This knowledge will help you decide whether the event met the original objectives and its effect on the participants. You should then share this data with all relevant stakeholders to prepare an adequate follow-up.
Conclusion
The above five are not everything you need to know about throwing a grand corporate event at the end of the day, but they are the main requirements you need to follow to get what you want. You need to know how to identify a successful catering bid, advertise your event, and select the event's suitable activities. That's a storey for another day, though.
We focus on helping aspiring entrepreneurs and investors select the most successful company set up here at commitbiz. The world's most modern industry is the event management sector. Even though the procedure can seem straightforward, it can complicate things if you skip a single move, so it is advisable to get advice from experts. For a hassle-free process or if you need any help, contact us - we are glad to help.
