Corporate events are one of the most important forums for businesses, they provide an opportunity to present the best ideas from within a company to management and other departments.

Here are our must-do steps to when it comes to planning a corporate event:

Set your goals!

Before you begin to plan the ultimate corporate event, it is important to first understand what key stakeholders in the business expect to get out of the event. To do this, have a meeting with the most influential voices to create a checklist of key deliverables that the stakeholders want.

Once it has been understood what goals are needed to be achieved, you can begin securing a venue and speakers.

Common goals that could be set are; to bring the company together to analyse historical performance and set future goals; to collect the best ideas from within the company to spark innovation; to establish a company-wide vision.

Build a marketing campaign

Even though the event is internal, this doesn’t mean that marketing it shouldn’t be at the forefront of your mind. For a successful corporate event to be planned, employees need to buy into the idea, and to do that you need to generate excitement.

Email marketing can still be used even though they will be sent internally. In fact, the majority of organiser rely on this to create a buzz. These emails should lead recipients to join a private corporate forum or social event platform such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Here is where you can share updates and interact with attendees.

Invest in captivating speakers

Hiring a high quality speaker for your corporate event is very important. Choosing the right speaker can change the entire tone of an event, and even inspire the attendees long after the event ends.

2016 has marked as the year where event organisers are looking for speakers who provide deep knowledgeable insight, rather than ones with recognisable celebrity names. These speakers can even come from inside of the business – this will capture the imaginations of the attendees and also make the insight more relatable.

Post-event debrief

Many organisers forget this step, but it’s a vital one if you intend on doing a similar event in the future. What was a success? What did attendees enjoy the least? These are questions that can aid your decision making when planning the event again.

Ideas can be collected through sharing messages on the event networking platform e.g. Facebook. In addition, video recording the event and interviewing attendees makes it easier to find out what the attendants thoughts are.

To evaluate the ultimate success of the event though, you must measure if the goals that were set before the event were met. This can be some using post-event surveys.

Planning a corporate event is no easy task. It can be even more stressful when the event planner involved is a member of the organization.