Planning the company end of year event can be stressful for event organisers. Be sure to impress your colleagues, clients and boss with these great tips from CIS Event Management!
Know your audience.
Understand who is attending your event. This will help you make decisions around menu selection, ice breakers, venue location etc.
Outline your event aims.
What are you trying to achieve? Is the event a reward for the hard work of the staff or appreciation of your stakeholders and partners? Like all events, determining the aims from the get go is an important exercise.
Make it easy for your guests.
Be clear as crystal with your invitations. Go the extra mile and include directions, details on where to park or details for sourcing fancy dress (if your event is themed). Always consider what is going to make your guests lives easier!
Team guidelines for staff end of year events.
Ask Management or HR to send a quick reminder (for staff events) around alcohol policies and acceptable behaviour.
Budget for incidentals.
Allocate a little extra budget for incidentals (such as last minute guest invitations by management).
Budget for an AV technician.
Where your audio visual requirements go beyond the norm (e.g. microphone, lectern, data projector), you should consider budgeting for an AV Technician to be on site at your venue. This will help you avoid any unforeseen technical issues so that your event can run to schedule.
Check your contracts.
Get to know your venue contract and understand terms such as slippage clause (which is the adjusted price per person increase should your numbers fall below a certain amount). Never sign anything before totally understanding it and getting sign off from management.
Check, double check and triple check every last detail!
This goes without saying! A professional event manager is fastidious about every detail – we check, double check and then triple check every aspect of each event.
Extra support.
Working with a professional event manager such as CIS Event Management, doesn’t mean that you will miss out on planning parts of the event. Professional event managers are called in to either manage events end to end, or to work closely with event planners to support them during busy times.