Events in a corporate environment are often organized to communicate company strategy, change internal company behavior, launch a product or service, motivate, train or reward staff, or influence external behavior of customers towards the company. Mark.
In many cases, they bring company employees together, support broader sales or marketing initiatives, incentivize team achievements, or entertain senior leaders.
What is corporate event planning?
However, a successful corporate event planning goes beyond meeting planning. Although conferences and meetings can make up the majority of the workload, other events that you may be asked to host include corporate hospitality, customer entertainment, conventions, exhibitions, and employee events, such as incentive travel rewards programs, team building, motivational events, receptions, parties and charity fundraising days.
Planning and executing a successful corporate event is not an easy task. It is typically a month-long process consisting of several stages and a variety of organizational steps.
Types of corporate events
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As described above, corporate events can range from company conferences and in-house training seminars to days away from team and client hospitality. Therefore, when planning any type of corporate event, it is best to evaluate them in terms of their size.
Micro events (also known as "simple events") are planned for up to 100 delegates and often take the form of more intimate meetings or training sessions.
The planning requirements for these micro-events may simply involve reserving a room, presentation facilities, refreshments, and registration. However, referring to them as "simple events" can be misleading, as a day off or hospitality for 50 senior managers can be as complicated as planning a conference for 500 attendees.
Small events are classified between 100 and 250 delegates. They can be seminars, training sessions or departmental conferences.
Planners may need to manage a main stage itinerary and multiple side sessions, along with lunch, snacks, audiovisual installations, online registration, and transportation.
Medium events are more dependent on technology. It could be company-wide conferences for up to 1,000 delegates or leadership summits for important clients to meet with senior leaders.
A branded website, pre-event communications, and event mobile app should be part of the budget considerations. Delegates may require hotel accommodation as well as transportation to take attendees to and from the venue. While a pre-event or post-event reception or evening entertainment may be required as part of a complex multi-stream conference schedule.
Large-scale events often require business technology tools to manage things like hotel room reservations, delegate flights, budgets, and online registration.
These can be multi-day events, so you might need off-site activities, dinner parties, partner programs, an awards ceremony, or other complex itinerary planning.
Staffing, catering, registration, speaker and delegate management will need to be carefully planned at scale. Conventions, for example, can attract up to 10,000 attendees and can last a few official website days.
Virtual meeting and event planning
Not all corporate events need to be face-to-face. Virtual meeting and event planning is an excellent option for these types of events. If you decide on a virtual event, you will need to ask yourself a few questions. Planning a more collaborative environment? Does your technology allow you to do this? And if it is a virtual event, do you want it to be informal or formal? Is the content attractive? And does your technology support networking opportunities? While the planning process does not vary much from face-to-face to virtual, the main difference will be in the production and presentation of your content, as well as the virtual technology used.