Types of corporate celebrations
- Internal Meetings
- Product Launches
- Conferences
- Training Workshops
- Seminars
Being a co-founder of Hypley, I have been attending many conferences, product launches etc every year. You will be surprised at the ratio of who gets it right and who doesn’t. Most celebrations are organised by someone who doesn’t know how to host an event! It’s not their fault, but I wrote this article for businesses to rethink their corporate event plan with some fun suggestions.
1. Corporate celebrations type: Internal meetings
Internal meetings can get boring and should need event planning expertise similar to a conference. You can make your companies next internal meeting less boring, more fun and a better experience worth people’s time away from their desk. Here are some fun ideas for internal meetings:
- Who said coloring is just for kids? Choose a day of the week to include this activity, usually Thursday. This will be your creative brainstorming session, let’s talk colors, decompress together before finishing the week. This has helped companies develop successful and new product development efforts. Engaging with your employees while stimulating their minds is a whole new way to promote out of the box thinking.
- Tell Stories using Metaphors: Make your internal meeting relatable to everyday business by using real world examples like case studies.
- Keep it short: Depending on the purpose of the meeting, make sure it stays focused and doesn’t go off track. Set your start time and end time. Google knows how important it is to keep internal meetings concise and to the point. They have someone taking notes and someone making decisions at every meeting. The decision maker has a say on every issue and makes it their job to keep the meeting productive. Normally the team votes on the decision makers ahead of time via email.
2. Corporate celebrations type: Product Launches
Good product launches should leave people excited. A powerful moment for any business looking to forward their brand, a product launch is one of the few times where employees, investors and members of the press gather at one place.
- Emphasize: Rarely do you hear Steve Jobs talking about the various features of Apple products. Standing on stage, he doesn’t push the speed of the iPhone’s processor or the screen resolution, for example. He knows most people don’t care, and the ones who do can easily find that information on Apple’s website or product literature. Instead, he goes out of his way to emphasize how the product affects you. He talks about how annoying it is to carry both a phone and an MP3 player and how, with an iPhone, you’re condensing them down to one easy-to-carry device. It’s about simplicity, productivity, style — all things he knows people are interested in.
- Theme & Hype: A theme sets the tone for your whole event, could be from 3 months before it. When starting to plan your event, choose a theme and stick with it through the whole journey. And align your invitations, set up of the room etc according to the theme.
- Technology is your friend: Use augment, virtual reality or something else that’s new and trendy to make the event fun and lively.
3. Corporate celebrations type: Conferences
When your company wants to host a conference, remember your reputation is on the line. Conferences is an opportunity to demonstrate your company is truly a thought leader in your industry, capable of bringing together speakers and other content that provides value.
Prices run high for corporate celebrations, so you need to pull off an experience worth the investment. Hypley however makes it easier to host these type of celebrations by bringing together packages for your event to choose from. Here’s some ideas on creating the customer experience.
- Find the best event speakers: Conference-goers are willing to travel far distances for the right speaker lineup. When offering your tickets get them to answer what speakers or topics they are interested in.
- Get a great MC: Often the last item left to secure once the rest of the budget has been spent, yet the person that can have the biggest influence on how your audience feels, is the Master of Ceremonies. Whereas talent like Celebrity Chefs can be ridiculously over priced, a fun and engaging MC can be great value and given they have the most face time with your audience they can have an immeasurable difference on your big day.
- Update your Socials: We know social media for some people is advertising the life they wish they had. And sometimes it can look believable. You can do the same with your conference on social media. Give your delegates a compelling reason to attend your conference in those updates, and a link to registration page to close the deal
- Offer interactive food and drink stations: There are many ways to feed attendees at the same time — like a customisable champagne cocktail bar, live stir-fry station, or even a donut wall. Dotting them throughout your event is a delightful surprise!
4. Corporate event type: Training workshops
Putting on training workshops for employees doesn’t seem like a fun task, but it can be.
Here are a few ways to get people engaged:
Break people out of their distractions and get them participating. Here are few ways to get people engaged:
- Change the room layout: Training rooms are always laid out in the same way – rows of tables and chairs. Challenge the convention and surprise your attendees by perhaps providing beanbags instead of chairs, standing podium tables, or tables with just a few chairs to encourage small groups.
- Play Games: Need to keep your attendees focused? Tap into their competitive sides. Puzzles or riddles, crosswords, memory games, ordering tasks — all the above are great ways to keep your attendees engaged and on-task. For added drama, impose a time limit. Try introducing a quick quiz at the end of each content section, helping recap on what’s been learned, and offer a small prize for the winner.
- Turn audience members into participants: Encourage participation, even from shy attendees. For those who don’t like to speak up in a group, consider using real-time polling apps like Sli.do to encourage the asking of questions from mobile devices.
5. Corporate event type: Seminars
Seminars are often used to showcase a company’s expertise on a specific topic or internally to provide employees with learning opportunities. They also usually allow audience members to interact with the speaker.
To mix things up at your next corporate seminar, consider the following tips:
- Think outside the ballroom: Sometimes the best venues are the ones that don’t feel corporate at all. Multiple nontraditional venues, for example, have helped Techweek become the nation’s leading technology conference and festival.
- Incorporate an activity during break time: Instead of the usual coffee break, consider adding something experiential into that time. Informal fireside chat sessions, for example, can energise attendees and help their brains get the break from learning as they need to focus when they come back.
- Lean on technology: Instead of a PowerPoint presentation, consider how you can help your speakers connect with the audience better — whether that’s through an app, social media, or even a chatbot to help people discover relevant content.
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