Universal Tips For Successful Corporate Event Planning

As you’re probably discovering, there’s a lot of planning that goes into a corporate event; from finding the right venue to settling on a menu selection to any agenda constraints and beyond. All this daunting work is what’s brought you here, right? Although the success of any corporate event depends heavily on the individual situation, there are some universal tips which tend to work in almost any context…

Make Room for a Fun, But Relevant Theme

Having determined what you hope to get out of your corporate event, the next thing you need to settle on is a fun theme that will engage the participants through the course of your event. You may even want to actively get them involved, asking them to brainstorm different ways they can get themselves immersed in the theme – viewing related videos beforehand, or doing some kind of low-demand team exercise. Aside from being pretty conducive to excitement, themes can be a great way to make the whole event feel more cohesive, especially if it’s running over several days. If it’s practical, you can weave elements of the theme throughout various phases of the event, connecting the dots for the people who will be coming. This brings us onto…

Keep Everyone Engaged

If one of your main goals for this event is teaching people new skills, then be sure to explore training methods that require active participation from the trainees. This kind of learning is often much more effective in the long run, in terms of retention. Even if you just scratch the surface of modern corporate event planning, you’ll realize there’s a massive amount of emphasis on getting participants out of their chairs, and interacting with one another. This is because when most modern workers learn by doing, it tends to stay with them longer than anything that’s taught to them through passive learning methods. One increasingly popular staple of modern corporate events is experiential learning exercises. The concept is pretty simple; participants are given a brief for a fun, yet challenging project which gets them working closely with their colleagues. The skills they need to complete the task are the ones they need to succeed in a given area of work. You’ll help your employees refine and perfect their work skills, while giving them a welcome break from the routine.

Invest in Retention

No corporate event should be dusted off and then forgotten about. In fact, this could usually render it one big waste of money. You need to have a plan in place to reinforce whatever lessons your workers took away from the experience. Popular post-event retention tools include videos and webinars that will refresh your employees on their event training, interactive slideshows and online games that will test people’s retention of the core concepts, and later group discussions where participants are encouraged to go over the challenges they encountered during the event, and the solutions they came up with. Keep retention in mind from the start, and you’ll have a much more successful event overall.

 

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