Event planning in Melbourne

Corporate events are used to communicate company strategy and change company behavior. They also launch products or services, motivate, train, reward employees, or influence customers’ behaviour towards the brand.

They often bring together employees from the company, support larger marketing and sales initiatives, reward team accomplishments, or entertain senior executives.

What’s corporate event planning?

Corporate event planning is more than just meeting planning. Conferences and meetings are the most common tasks. Still, you might also be responsible for client entertainment, corporate hospitality, conventions and exhibitions, and employee events (such as team building, incentive travel reward programs and motivational events, receptions and parties, and charity fundraising day).

It is not an easy task to plan and execute a corporate event. This is a lengthy process that involves many stages and multiple organizational steps.

Types of corporate events

Corporate events may include company conferences, internal training seminars, team away-days, and client hospitality. It is important to evaluate the size of any corporate event when planning.

Small events: can accommodate up to 100 people and take the form of training sessions or meetings.

These micro-events require a room reservation, presentation facilities, break-out refreshments and registration. These events are not simple and can be misinterpreted. For example, planning an away day for 50 senior managers or hospitality can be just as difficult as planning for 500 people.

Small events: can accommodate between 100 and 250 people. These could be training days, seminars, or departmental conferences.

Planners might need to plan a main stage and break-out sessions. Lunch, refreshments, audio-visual equipment, online registration and transportation are all possible.

Large events: are more dependent on technology. These could be company-wide events for over 1,000 delegates, or summits for key client customers that bring together senior leaders.

Budgetary considerations should include a branded website, prevent communications, as well as an event mobile application. The delegate may require hotel accommodation and transport to and from the venue. A multi-stream conference may require a reception before or after the event or entertainment at night.

Large-scale events: often require enterprise technology tools for managing elements such as budgets, flight reservations, delegate flights, registrations online, and hotel rooms.

These events may last several days, so it is possible to need additional activities, dinners or partner programs.

You will need to carefully plan for staffing, catering, registration, speaker management, and delegate management. Conventions can host up to 10,000 people and last for several days.

Event budget

Every aspect of corporate event planning can be affected by the budget available, including the venue selection and speaker choices, as well as the level of catering, entertainment and staffing.

Consider whether your budget is purely for outgoings or if you can supplement it with income from sponsors, exhibitors or other sources.

Is this an event that has occurred in the past? If yes, you can use the budget from before to create a baseline. However, inflation and changing needs should be taken into account.

Past budgets can be used to give you a better idea of the prices that suppliers will charge. These figures can be used to help you avoid being overcharged when reaching out to suppliers to get initial quotes.