Our industry offers a wide variety of events and a great part of them are corporate. And being good at organising corporate events offers strategic advantages. As you can guess from the name, a corporate event is an event organised by a company for its internal or external purposes. To put it simple, it can be whatever. That is why we've prepared our list of the three types of events most requested by clients to share with you our experience and provide some tips.
“We need to be prepared to give a creative, fast, efficient, and cost-effective response."
Team building for an HR department, annual salesforce convention, institutional meeting with public or media, afterhours activation, street or guerrilla marketing… we need to be prepared to organise all this and much more. And by saying ‘prepared’ we mean the capacity to give a creative, fast, efficient, and cost-effective response to any client's request of this type. Obviously, it's impossible to provide generic solutions for projects of such a diverse nature. Nevertheless, we can identify what they have in common to make our work easier.
Corporate conventions and forums
First among the three types of the events most commonly requested by the clients are the conventions (internal) and forums (external) with a high number of attendees. Here, the creative touch can be achieved though the venue options and the selection of speakers, show or leisure activity, or the gastronomic proposal, if needed.
Besides, timing and logistics are fundamental in these cases. And the general rule is ‘the earlier, the better’. Depending on the season and the event characteristics, it can be quite hard to find a venue that would meet all the requirements and, on top of this, would be ‘appealing, fresh and different’. That is why, it's essential to guarantee the venue's availability and book it well in advance. Because a good venue is the winning score. The clients are often ready to choose a creatively less convincing proposal, which is something easy to improve, that goes in a pack with a venue aligned with the events’ practical, aspirational, and aesthetic needs.
Logistics is also important and closely related to the choice of the venue. It's fundamental to make sure that both attendees' transportation and accommodation, as well as assembly and disassembly are physically and economically feasible.
Live and hybrid talks and webinars
These events normally respond to the company's expertise building strategy. In other words, they help the company to position itself as an expert in a specific field through general spread of knowledge or communication of expertise in a certain area. And among them, the hybrid events are more interesting to analyse, as the live talks share characteristics with almost any other institutional event, except perhaps for the number of attendees.
To make sure your hybrid webinar is a success, you need three things: a good and interesting speaker, an appropriate and well tested streaming platform and the possibility of feedback and interaction.
The speaker is essential to catch and keep the attention of the online audience. And the search criteria are very simple: choose speakers whose intervention has caught and kept your own attention both for its content and the presentation skills. Otherwise, after five minutes into your webinar there will be just three yawning viewers left.
“Allow viewers to take part in the action."
And of course, enable feedback tools and ways of interaction. The possibility to get involved considerably increases the engagement and appeal of a webinar. Let’s be honest, we love to ask questions. So, be it via an integrated chat, live connections (when possible), real-time surveys, etc., but allow the attendees to take part in the action.
Experiential spaces and activations
And last but not least in our top-3 of the events most requested by the clients we have the experiential activations. These events have literally nothing in common with what we have seen previously. Here what prevails is the creativity, the visual appeal, the action, and ultimately, the experience. In this article, however, we are not going to focus on the ways in which a brand can be more creative, but will rather try to point out some key aspects for you to bear in mind while working on projects of this kind.
First of all, a request for an event of this type will most likely come from Marketing and Advertising Department, rather than from the Event Department as such. Or at least, Marketing and Advertising will have a lot to say in the decision-making process. Why? On closer look, experiential activations are advertising actions in a form of an event. That is why, make sure that the proposal you prepare goes beyond a merely executional presentation. It must be consistent with the brand's values and storytelling; the creative concept must be well explained and integrated…. The whole thing should build on what the brand has been communicating up to the moment and add value to its current situation.
Then, if the ideal location for this event is a public space, make sure you can get all the necessary permissions from the local authorities. We all know how slow and awkward the bureaucracy can be. So, request all the authorisations well in advance. It's very frustrating to find out that your brilliant idea that the client is in love with cannot be implemented because of a missing signature.
And finally, take care of the quality of your project's execution. To the minimum detail. If there’s something in the quotation you cannot cut down, it's the quality of execution. The quality of the final experience is the guarantee of the client's willingness (or unwillingness) to come back to you for their next project.
