Creating and executing a conference is a powerful way to boost morale, provide further training and education, strengthen a company’s relationship with its employees, and enhance company sales.
It’s no surprise that the benefits of a conference come with a level of complexity and challenge from its planning stages all the way to the evaluation stage. Fortunately, this post serves to guide you through the daunting process to ensure you reap every benefit a company conference has to offer.
Are you looking to strictly enhance company sales through education and motivation? Need to build moral and connections between different geographical teams? Perhaps marketing a new product to potential clients?
Get together with your team to determine exactly what your company needs most and how the conference can help meet those needs.
Consider your desired style of conference, what kind of speakers you’ll require (if necessary), engagement or team building activities, perks or giveaways, workshop topics, and methods of topic presentation.
How you execute the conference is just as important as why you want to hold the conference in the first place. If you have a special planning group or committee, enlisting their knowledge and skills is crucial. A challenge of conferences can be interactivity, so consider if interactive methods like voting would benefit your presentations.
Now that you have a solid purpose and a good idea of methods to achieve the conference’s goals, it’s time to map out a comprehensive budget.
Your budget should include every detail your team can think of from the number of participants, the venue, catered meals and snacks, workshop materials, freebie and giveaway costs, to the cost of speakers, workshop leaders, and staff.
After your costs are determined, brainstorm ways in which your company will raise the funds. Is there already money set aside in the company budget? Perhaps a fundraising campaign is in order. No matter how you need to acquire funding and support, ensure a plan is set in place and that the monetary goal is attainable.
Do the desired methods your team came up fit within your budget? If not, refine your methods and options until they do. This is a wonderful opportunity for creativity and collaboration, so make sure to consider the ideas of your teammates, if possible—their solutions may surprise you!
So, you have your goals, methods, and budget set up and ready to go, and everything is coming along smoothly. Before you hire anyone or even book the venue, however, you must first gather the availability of those whose services you require.
If you plan on hiring caterers, vendors, staff, and speakers, determine their availability and match it to your team’s. This will ensure a smoother way to determine the conference date. This is imperative, as you don’t want to center your conference around a dynamic speaker only to learn she’ll be out of the country on the day of.
Now that you’ve coordinated your desired speakers and vendors to determine a solid date, it’s time to book your venue. Referring back to your goals and desired methods, verify that the venue offers the necessary and functional spaces your conference will need.Note: If you require a back room for caterers, conference rooms for workshops, or just one large auditorium, be sure to look for an available venue that ticks every box.
Now that times have been coordinated, the date’s been set, and the venue has been booked, it’s time to take action and begin hiring. Keep an updated list of vendors, caterers, miscellaneous staff, and speakers you’ll need and hire accordingly. Send off important information like the date, times, and location, as well as any contracts or paperwork as necessary.
What, when, where, and in which order should the events take place? Consider the structure and flow of your conference, and set it up to avoid too much stagnation and minimize lulls. Remember to include free time during the conference for networking, as well as any snack or meal times, and breaks. Will you be including any after-event activities such as a dinner or sightseeing tour? Will you set up the conference to begin and end early or to begin and end later in the day? Collaborate with your team to determine the optimal agenda, and make sure everyone is on the same page.
This step is crucial, you must create and maintain the buzz for the conference while ensuring prospective participants are excited. You want them to know they absolutely cannot miss this opportunity. Determine the best methods to market and publicize the event based on audience analysis, as marketing internally to employees in the same company will be different than marketing toward clients.
On the day of, ensure all aspects and staff are in place, on the same page, and ready to start on time. Then, begin your conference, relax, and have fun! Afterward, evaluate the conference. Consider a questionnaire sent to those who participated, to gather important and valuable feedback which will help determine the conference’s success. Another way is to poll the audience right at the end of the meeting. This has shown better response rates.
This is an important aspect of conference planning that should never be skipped. Attendees may have recurring suggestions of improvement, or highlight events that really worked for them. Listening to your audience can be pivotal, not only in planning a better conference next year but to also highly feedback use and improvement for marketing purposes.
When a company takes suggestions and puts them into action, it leaves a positive impression and builds trust with your audience while attracting new participants who want in.
Now that you have a thorough outline of conference planning tips, it’s time to take action. Option Technologies offers powerful tools and services to make your meeting or conference even better. Contact us to have the best team on your side during the conference planning process!