What is corporate event planning?
Corporate event planning involves organising business events to engage customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Common reasons for hosting corporate events include:- Educate employees or the public about new initiatives and offerings
- Reward staff for their contribution to the company’s growth and success
- Celebrate milestones with clients, employees, and other members
- Announce organisational changes and potential impacts
- Facilitate collaboration and networking among different business teams
Whether you’re hosting a client hospitality event or an internal training seminar — the ultimate aim is to bring people together, create a memorable experience, and help all the attendees develop strong business relationships.The challenges of corporate event planning
Corporate event planning can help elevate your brand, engage employees and stakeholders, and widen your business network—but it doesn't come without its fair share of challenges.Even super-human organisational skills aren’t always enough to execute a successful event. That’s why every corporate event manager needs to expect the unexpected and prepare accordingly.Let’s look at the common corporate event planning challenges you might encounter — and how to avoid them.Sticking to your event budget
Event budgeting can set you up for success—or failure—when planning in-person gatherings, virtual events, or a hybrid event. Budget is an issue that troubles even the most experienced event planners—costs quickly add up and, before you know it, you’ve blown the budget.Things change all the time, and you may have additional requirements just before the event. For example, supplier costs may go up based on actual costs or you may encounter an unanticipated expenditure. That’s why it’s wise to keep your expenses modest and ensure you budget a contingency fund. We recommend about 20% of your total budget set aside for unexpected expenses and last-minute changes. Even better, analyse previous research and data to identify what a realistic budget should be for each occasion. For example, compare budgeted line items—such as venue, food, beverage, travel, accommodation, speaker fees, staffing, and marketing—with those from your previous events.Dedicated corporate event management software makes this so much eaiser by keeping all your budgeting data in one place. This way, you can plan event budgets, create budget reports, and uncover the total return on investment (ROI) to track spending and make budget-friendly decisions.Event budgeting made easy
Download our free event budget template to get you started.Attendee engagement and communication
A solid attendee engagement plan is key to exceeding attendee expectations. That’s why it’s vital to consider your prospective audience and understand their preferences.You also need to avoid information overload, which can quickly disengage participants. At the same time, you also need to be able to communicate event details, changes, and deadlines to attendees before and during the event. Here are some of the easiest ways to ensure that your attendees remain engaged throughout an event.- Organise plenary sessions with engaging speakers to ensure participation and high attendee engagement. You can also arrange table discussions or real-time Q&As to keep attendees involved in the event.
- Create interactive content for conference breakouts with targeted and interactive content to foster conversation and connection.
- Create networking opportunities to make sure there are enough ways for attendees to connect. Connecting with others in their field is a top benefit for employees when it comes to corporate events.
Gathering and learning from feedback is also a great way to understand how attendees want to engage. Use digital tools to run live polls and gather data that’ll help you adjust priorities. That way, you can continue to learn as you organise more and more events.These are the common problems you’ll face regardless of the type of event you’re hosting. Even smaller events can run into these issues—so, how do you avoid them?Let’s look at the five C’s of corporate event management for tips on how to ensure your events are a success—from attendee registration to post-event reporting.The 5C’s of corporate event management
These 5C’s will help ensure your event runs smoothly from start to finish.- Concept: Make sure you have clear event objectives to ensure both stakeholders and the event planning team are on the same page in terms of vision, goals, responsibilities, and timeline.
- Coordination: Consider how you’ll plan your event, including logistics, strategy, plans, and budget. Event planning requires precise organisation and coordinated efforts, so starting sooner rather than later is a must.
- Control: Assign roles to the members of your team to ensure all bases are covered and make sure everyone knows who’s responsible for what. Establish a hierarchy for approval. Event management software can speed up the approval process and help you assign responsibilities quickly.
- Culmination: All your hard work leading up to the event day is worth nothing if you’re unable to execute your plans. Make sure you have everything in place for day-of logistics long before the event beginnings to ensure everything runs smoothly.
- Closing: Measure your event success to improve on future event planning. Consider aspects such as attendee engagement, attendee satisfaction, and event KPIs for measuring event success.
Keeping track of the 5C’s of corporate event planning enables you to break your event up into stages, and streamline your event management process.Having trouble mapping out your corporate event?
Try TravelPerk’s Event Management Solution to find out how you could speed-up your event-based business trips by managing attendees, booking travel, scheduling meetings, and choosing a location—all on one platform.Corporate event management best practices: 6 steps for seamless corporate events
Now, onto the dos and don’ts of event planning. Whether you’re a new or a pro event manager, follow these steps when planning your next big corporate event.1. Outline event objectives
You can’t create a compelling event plan without knowing what you’re looking to achieve. Discuss event objectives with your senior leadership team and develop a solid understanding of why this event matters.Consider the following when setting your event objectives:- Research the target audience and understand what they want from events
- Decide whether you want to educate, motivate, or inspire with your content
- Have a clear purpose to align your event with organisational objectives from the outset
- Zero in on the metrics that you want to measure for determining event success
Once you identify the focus of an event, you’ll be in a better position to tackle the event budget.3. Develop an event marketing plan
For your public events, you’ll need to allow time to market your event—all your planning is for nothing if nobody attends, after all.Ask these questions to better understand your audience:- What are the demographic trends of your attendees?
- What social media channels do they use?
- Which digital touchpoints are necessary for reaching them?
- Does the event solve a specific problem?
- When are your attendees usually online?
These answers will help you lay the foundations of your event marketing strategy. Think of every touchpoint you can use to reach attendees throughout the event lifecycle—be it with in-office displays, an event website, or marketing emails.4. Consider sponsors and how you’ll find them
Finding the right sponsors for your public events can be a win-win for both you and your chosen sponsor. Event sponsors provide you with key event resources in return for promotion. And keep in mind that you can have more than one sponsor at a time, especially for bigger events. Here’s how you can go about finding a sponsor for your event:- Identify a list of target sponsors capable of providing the resources you need.
- Align sponsor goals with event objectives to gain interest.
- Create different sponsorship levels to cater to sponsors of all sizes.
Building relationships with sponsors helps your long-term corporate events plan—one successful event could easily turn into a dozen.5. Monitor attendee experience
Once you’ve taken care of the event goals, budget, marketing, and sponsors—take time to think about attendees.How can you ensure all attendees enjoy the experience? The answer lies in personalising the attendee experience with mobile experiences and engaging content.Here’s what you can do to ensure interaction among your audience:- Drive audience engagement with interactive maps, quizzes, feedback surveys, polls, and other forms of gamification.
- Use mobile apps to send last-minute event change notifications or discounts.
- Allow attendees to personalise schedules and attend different networking or breakout sessions.
Keeping attendees engaged is a whole lot easier with event management software. Many event management solutions offer a mobile app to facilitate the experience for attendees.6. Post-event engagement strategies
Your event isn’t over once the last guest exits the venue—there’s still lots of work to be done. This is where the post-event engagement phase begins. It’s a key stage for gathering feedback to improve your next event.Consider these post-event engagement strategies to provide a great post-event experience for your attendees:- Create a post-event survey to measure attendee satisfaction and offer an incentive to increase participation.
- Set up a follow-up networking event to create a community and facilitate conversations among returning guests.
- Create text and video blogs to repurpose valuable conference content. You’ve likely gathered ample information, both from speakers and attendees.
- Send a thank you gift to appreciate attendees’ time and participation. This can also be a great way to promote sponsors and satisfy agreements.
- Host a social media contest to generate buzz and get more user-generated content by getting attendees to share their experiences.
- Offer discounts and deals to promote products in the days following your event, when attendees are most engaged.
Corporate event planning: A checklist for success
Planning corporate events can be overwhelming even when you know what it takes to bring events to life.Take the guesswork out of planning and free up your mental energy with this corporate event checklist. Our number one item on any event planning checklist, however, is to make sure you have a powerful corporate event planning tool on your side. This makes every step of the corporate event planning process a whole lot easier.TravelPerk’s event management solution can help you take your corporate event to the next level. It allows you to get all your attendees and employees from wherever they are right to your event–safely, fast, and seamlessly.With TravelPerk’s event solution, you can manage everything you need from the same platform:- Manage invites: Invite attendees and track their responses and the status of their bookings.
- Keep everyone in the loop: Share trip details like attendee names, logistics, agendas, and everything needed for the event to run smoothly.
- Track every detail: Keep attendees and participants updated with real-time information and changes to the plan.
- Increase visibility and tracking: View attendees’ travel plans, including arrival and departure times and accommodation details.
Forget the constant back and forth, and rest easy knowing your event-based business trips are under control.Get a demo of TravelPerk today to find out how you can start mastering your corporate event planning process and more.?)
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