Ensure the success of your Autumn corporate events!

Ensure the success of your Autumn corporate events!

Autumn is often the time when team-build­ing events, sem­i­nars and work­shops – either com­mer­cial or inter­nal — are organ­ised. Plan­ning these pro­fes­sion­al events is rarely the only role of the per­son in charge, who is left with many things to think about with­in a gen­er­al­ly very short time. Here are some ideas on how to make your event a suc­cess and how best to plan it.

Con­tent:

  1. Send­ing out invitations
  2. Plan­ning the day
  3. Review­ing the event

1. Sending out invitations

The first step of event plan­ning is to set the date, the for­mat and know how many peo­ple are expect­ed to attend!

Be care­ful with your invi­ta­tions. For an inter­nal event, invi­ta­tions can be infor­mal and sent by e‑mail or using the company’s inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel (intranet, mes­sag­ing plat­form, etc.).

For a com­mer­cial event aim­ing at reach­ing prospects and part­ners, you should cus­tomise your invi­ta­tions, send them ear­ly and fol­low up with reminders. For instance, you could send a “Save the Date” then a reminder sev­er­al weeks before the event (remem­ber that emails start pil­ing up as soon as every­one is back from sum­mer hol­i­days). Spec­i­fy­ing the person’s first and last names and adding a unique or per­son­al touch can make the dif­fer­ence for the guest and his/her per­cep­tion of the event.

Gen­er­ate inter­est with the pro­gramme (theme, enter­tain­ment, spe­cial guests …).

On your reg­is­tra­tion plat­form, use a form (a short one, we do not want to lose guests due to too many ques­tions) to learn more about your guests: their com­pa­ny, their role, how long have they been in that role, their avail­abil­i­ty — if you have sev­er­al pos­si­ble dates – any activ­i­ties and work­shops that might inter­est them … In order to bet­ter under­stand expec­ta­tions and give you a good foun­da­tion for plan­ning and com­mu­ni­ca­tion of your event thereafter!

For instance, if you have already planned ses­sions, work­shops or dis­cus­sions, you can cre­ate a reg­is­tra­tion plat­form for each ses­sion to be able to increase — if nec­es­sary — the num­ber of work­shops if atten­dance is high or, con­verse­ly, reduce their length and review the format.

2. Planning the day

Your event’s for­mat will depend on its pur­pose — it can last one evening, half a day or a cou­ple of days. These ele­ments will help you define the venue, the sched­ule, and the ser­vice providers nec­es­sary for your event.

Your guests do not know each oth­er? This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to encour­age meet­ings and dis­cus­sions. Think about cre­at­ing net­work­ing spaces and enter­tain­ment to encour­age inter­ac­tions and team-build­ing. An app or an inter­ac­tive game can be a good tool to gam­i­fy your event, get peo­ple to know the com­pa­ny bet­ter and chal­lenge the teams.

For your prospects, present your ser­vices and your prod­ucts in a unique way whether using a per­for­mance or inter­ac­tive spaces. It can be inter­est­ing to com­bine two types of pre­sen­ta­tions: some­thing unique and a sec­ond, more con­ven­tion­al one, for those who would rather see a pre­sen­ta­tion in a keynote for­mat. This will allow you to com­mu­ni­cate comprehensively.

Pre­sen­ta­tions and speech­es are expect­ed? Keep it sim­ple and pro­mote exchange, avoid very for­mal Pow­er­Point decks. Many new solu­tions exist now to liv­en up your meet­ings, share and inter­act as a team, even when peo­ple are spread out around the world with­out hav­ing to link Pow­er­Point and Skype in con­fer­ence mode!

Use social media to increase your expo­sure and encour­age con­tent shar­ing, your col­lab­o­ra­tors and par­tic­i­pants will be your best ambas­sadors. Engage­ment is cre­at­ed through enter­tain­ment, so this is essential.

Do not under­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of breaks, be it break­fast, lunch or cock­tail and buf­fet in the evening. These moments will allow you to cre­ate a per­son­al touch and warm and friend­ly moments using food-trucks, cater­ers, unique booths, or music. This is the key moment of the event in terms of par­tic­i­pant expe­ri­ence. Remem­ber to take the time to find the right ser­vice providers, to brief them and to plan all the logis­tics around those moments: how do they set-up in rela­tion to the space? What are their schedules?

3. Reviewing the event

At the end of the event, you should thank every­one and use this oppor­tu­ni­ty to ask for feed­back: What were the moments and activ­i­ties they liked? What improve­ments could be made? Would they like a new edi­tion the fol­low­ing year?

We recent­ly spoke about this: the impor­tance of insights and data is proven. The data and feed­back you will col­lect is essen­tial to take stock of your event and define what improve­ments should be made for your next events. They will also allow you to get in touch again with poten­tial prospects, to cus­tomise your mes­sages accord­ing to the top­ics they pre­ferred (Which booths did they stop at? Which speak­er did they see? Did they network?).

You can retrieve this infor­ma­tion in the forms filled at reg­is­tra­tion but also dur­ing the event itself by ask­ing for feedback.

We could talk to you about organ­ising profes­sional events for hours, but there comes a time when you have to take action. Dis­cov­er all the fea­tures of our online tick­et­ing and regis­tration, access con­trol and cash­less pay­ment solu­tions by click­ing below:

Organ­ise a profes­sional event

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