7 Steps to Planning the Best Corporate Events

There are many good reasons to plan and orchestrate a corporate event.

In truth, the best corporate events are those where employees leave feeling inspired, motivated, and energized!

There are also many different types of corporate events. Some companies hire event planners for this type of thing. Others take on the responsibilities on their own, assigning duties and tasks to leadership and management to ensure that everything gets done.

At the end of the day, the goal of any successful corporate event should be to bring the team together, to facilitate greater teamwork, to educate, to innovate, to integrate new training and technology, and/or to create an environment where the purpose of the company can be thoroughly examined and understood—to give everyone involved a stronger sense of purpose.

With that being said, putting on a successful corporate event isn’t always easy.

There are, admittedly, a lot of steps involved in the process.

So let’s break it down and go in-depth to explore the 7 most crucial steps to making your corporate event an incredible success. 

What Are The Different Types Of Corporate Events?

The best corporate events are events where a defined purpose for the event is outlined before you ever start planning.

You never want to try to facilitate a corporate event with an ill-defined or undefined purpose.

Planning a successful event will require you to know exactly what you wish to accomplish.

And this generally starts with deciding on the primary category of event you wish to facilitate.

Here are 4 of the main types of corporate events that businesses tend to facilitate.

Workshops

Some of the best corporate events consist of workshops, where team-members are brought together for additional training, education, and team-building.

Workshops, also known as ‘corporate training,’ generally consist of a system of activities designed to help educate your team and expand their awareness about jobs they’re already doing, but could be doing better.

Training Sessions

The best corporate events to help train new team members, or to help train seasoned team members on new systems or technologies, involve corporate event training sessions.

These may be part of a larger overarching corporate conference or annual event—or they may be standalone events to help you integrate new technologies, skills, or schools of thinking within your organization.

Conferences

The best corporate events where medium to large scale teams can join together and interact with shareholders, resellers, and even stakeholders generally fall into the category of ‘conferences.’

These events may involve any number of different programs, speeches, training sessions, news announcements, and more.

Conferences generally last at least a day. But they may also last a bit longer than that—sometimes taking place over the weekend.

They may also take place at a remote vacation destination, and can sometimes fit into the ‘bleisure’ (business/leisure travel) category.

Annual Events

Corporate annual events are best defined as recurring events that serve specific functions within the organization.

These events could be conferences, training sessions, workshops, or even corporate retreats.

If your company holds annual events, they probably already have a preferred format and ‘template’ for the event.

But if you’re responsible for starting this process from scratch, you may have to put all of these elements together yourself.

Special Note: Planning Corporate Events In New York City

Renting or securing corporate event space NYC for corporate events in New York can sometimes be a challenge.

This is because New York City is a busy place.

For this reason, it’s always better to secure your venue, campground, area, or meeting space well in advance—to make sure that you actually get the space, and that you won’t have to ‘scramble’ to secure it at the last minute.

How To Plan A Corporate Event In 7 Steps

Alright.

Now that we’ve covered some of the basics, let’s discuss the ‘meat and potatoes’ of the matter—planning an actual corporate event.

1. Determine Your Objective

The best corporate events are those with a clearly-defined objective.

Some examples of corporate event objectives could include:

• Creating stronger team bonds
• Motivating salespeople
• Sharing news with stakeholders
• Entertaining executives
• Planning for the upcoming year
• Training new staff
• Introducing a new product line

Whatever your objective is, make sure that it’s clearly defined.

This will help you as you facilitate planning for the event, because at every decision-making point, you can ask:

What will best help us to fulfill our corporate event objective?

The best answer will generally show you the correct decision to make.

2. Create A Plan

Creating a written plan for your corporate event is absolutely essential to bringing it together successfully.

Once again, you’ll want to review your objective to answer big questions like:

• How long will this event be?
• Where should it take place?
• What types of activities should we include?

Then, you can get a bit more specific, and plan for other important details. Some things that you may want to address/consider might include:

• Corporate event catering
• Corporate event entertainment
• Corporate appreciation events
• Corporate event awards

How To Facilitate Team Building Activities

Whether you’re facilitating a cooking class corporate event, or thinking about hosting unusual team building activities, it’s important to make sure that you plan out the details for all of these things ahead of time.

There’s a lot of ‘magic’ to be found in facilitating team-building activities. But once again, the devil is in the details. If you don’t thoroughly plan these things out, you’ll end up with a much less successful event and/or activity.

So plan ahead, and make sure that everyone’s on the same page.

Planning team building activities during Covid can be especially challenging.

You’ll want to be aware of any mandates or special Covid-related rules that need to be followed, especially if you’ll be handling food or working in close-quarters with others.

3. Consider Hiring A Corporate Event Planner

If you’re not fully confident in your ability to pull off this event on your own, consider hiring a corporate event planner to orchestrate the process for you.

Planning a large-scale event is obviously a complicated ordeal; but that also doesn’t mean that you don’t have what it takes to succeed at it.

Be honest with yourself about what you can and can’t do, and don’t be afraid to make the best decision for your company.

4. Delegate Roles And Responsibilities

Once you have a plan in place, and if you have indeed decided to orchestrate the planning of this event yourself… start assigning roles and responsibilities to other team members.

This is where delegation becomes an incredibly important skill set. It’ll also pay big dividends to put some work into becoming a better leader as you assign roles and manage the overall planning process of the event as well.

5. Book Your Venue

Booking corporate event venues is a process that’ll take up considerable time, attention, and planning.

You’ll need to shop for venues if you don’t already have one in mind.

Then, you’ll need to track down the contact information for the person responsible for renting it out, do research, and set up the reservation if you decide to utilize that venue.

Keep in mind that it can take some time to finalize a venue rental—so make sure to start this process early.

6. Make Preparations And Let Everyone Know What The Plan Is

Once you’ve finalized the timeline and all applicable preparations, it’ll be time to let everyone know what the plan is.

The best way to do this is to put together an event itinerary or program, and to distribute this to all applicable team members and members of leadership.

It’s also important that you make your leadership aware of the details. If anyone needs to approve of your decisions, make sure that this is checked off the list before you distribute event information to the rest of the team.

7. Make Sure To Plan For Sanitary Amenities

If your corporate event is going to take place outside, and if there aren’t adequate public or private restroom facilities available to service the number of people who’ll be in attendance, then you may want to look into portable restroom trailers for rent, or secure some mobile bathroom trailers to ensure that sanitary amenities will be available for guests.

If you’ve been looking for portable showers (for camping or overnight events in more rural locations), you might be typing things like ‘portable shower rental near me’ into your search engine.

Well, don’t worry.

At VIP To Go, we can provide not only luxury restroom trailers, but also shower trailers for corporate events just like yours.

Our trailers and showers come with their own fresh-water tanks, and we can even supply a generator.

This means that no matter how rural your corporate event is going to be, we can get you set up with sanitary amenities that’ll not only perform well, but that’ll be luxurious enough to make you look like an awesome event planner!

Check out our official portable toilet trailer rental guide for more information.