A professional business event is an opportunity for you to show off your skills in event management and impress your colleagues and managers. Business events are great opportunities for networking, teambuilding, and promoting your business.
However, a corporate event is also a site for potentially embarrassing gaffes, especially if you’re the one bearing the responsibilities of hosting. One wrong move and you could look unprofessional in front of your managers or affect the reputation of your whole company.
To guide you through event planning, here are a few dos and don’ts that can help you pull off a professional and entertaining business event. These tips are helpful whether you’re an experienced planner or working on your first event.
Do Hire a Professional to Run Your Event
When you’re planning a professional business event, you already have a lot on your plate. You don’t want to add hosting duties to that as well.
A good host can liven up an event and make sure that you hit any key points that you need to meet. A professional MC for events knows how to strike the right balance between entertaining and professional tones for corporate get-togethers. They also serve a functional purpose by making necessary announcements and moving proceedings along, so you stick to a schedule.
Having a professional MC also presents a more professional front than having someone from your organization take the microphone. It shows potential partners that your company invested in the event and wanted it to be the best it could be.
Don’t Forget the Entertainment
One mistake businesses often make when planning their professional events is foregoing any entertainment. They think that because an event is professional, the tone has to be completely serious.
In reality, people come to events expecting something different from a typical day at the office. They want to get to know the people they work with in a different setting and have a break from their typical routine. Having no entertainment will make the event feel too formal and will stilt potential networking and conversation. Gentle, event-appropriate entertainment is the way to go.
A professional networking event can have light, neutral music as its background. A more relaxed event, such as a corporate mixer, can have more exuberant entertainment options, such as comedians or magicians. Experts from Audio Visual Nation explain clients how simple adjustments in lighting and sound can completely transform the atmosphere of an event. They emphasize that tailoring audiovisual elements to match the event’s theme helps create a seamless and engaging guest experience.
Do Share a Schedule with Guests
When creating your professional business event, you need a schedule. The schedule helps you know when everything will happen and what needs to be prepared in advance for every step of the schedule to be met.
However, you shouldn’t keep the schedule to yourself and your team. Sharing it with your guests ahead of time is a nice professional touch. It shows invited guests that the event they are attending is planned out with important content. It can also help people make practical decisions, such as deciding if they will miss anything crucial if they need to leave early for childcare.
On the day of the event, share a printed schedule with your guests. Printed programs are practical and allow your guests to keep track of time without having to scramble for their phones. They are also a nice souvenir and piece of marketing material that helps you stick in the mind of your guests.
Don’t Lose Track of the Event’s Purpose
When you are caught up in the weeds of planning a professional business event, it’s easy to lose track of the bigger picture. The exact canape menu is occupying your mind, not your business’s strategy. However, losing track of your event’s overall purpose will impede its success. Every aspect of your event planning should be done with the purpose in mind.
Businesses decide to host events for a few different reasons. Some host big external events as part of their marketing strategy, others want to improve their team morale, while others use events to strengthen relationships with strategic partners.
The purpose of hosting will decide the tone and formality of your event. A relaxed teambuilding is different from a formal dinner celebrating a milestone partnership. Not planning your event with the goal in mind could lead to a mismatch in tone and embarrassing gaffes.
Hosting the Ideal Professional Event
There are plenty of guides online for hosting the perfect professional business event, with so much advice that it can get overwhelming. By following these simple guidelines, your event will be a success. Never lose track of the goal of your event or what your guests will be doing the entire time they are there. Make sure that they know what is happening and have something to do that makes their effort to attend your event worthwhile.
Hiring the right professionals, such as an MC with experience in corporate events, can help you pull off a successful business event.
