Event Planning Skills: What Every Corporate Event Planner Should Know
If you’re the one in charge of planning corporate events, then you know it’s a lot of work.
With all of the moving parts in a corporate event, there is tons of room for error.
As a corporate event planner, you need to always be improving your event planning skills to make sure that you’re always on top of it. There are quite a few skills that a good event planner must possess.
Keep reading for our guide on what every corporate event planner must know.
Communication is Key
One of the most important event planning skills you should have is good communication skills. You need to be able to communicate with the people you hire, people coming to your event, and the people working with you at the event.
Learn how to delegate tasks and communicate with your team so they know how you want them done. You should be able to explain to your team exactly how you want something done. As a corporate event planner, you also want to have good communication skills so a member of your team will come to you with any problems they may have.
You will also want to make sure you’re setting up times to meet with the people you hire for your event. This could be the speaker, caterers, or even the owner of the venue. Make sure you’re effectively communicating with these people so they know how to do their job correctly.
Stay Organized
There are two key factors for being organized. The first is keeping everything in order and the second is making sure everything gets done in a timely manner.
You should first sit down and create a list of everything that needs to get done and give yourself deadlines. This way you will have time to do everything.
Make sure to get the important things out of the way first! If you know everything that needs to get done, then you will have much less stress about the little details that pop up at the end of the planning process. You can use specialized event rental software to better organize your ins and outs.
Staying organized also means keeping anything important in order. Take the time to sit down and document parts of the process. If you have a budget you’re trying to stick with, then make sure you document each thing you spend money on and subtract it from your budget.
Being an organized corporate event planner might take some time and practice but it is a great skill to have. Take the time to create an organizational system before you even start the planning process.
Plan Engaging Workshops
As the corporate event planner, part of your job is to get interesting speakers or plan engaging workshops. Sometimes we focus a little bit too much on the networking aspect of corporate events and forget about the workshops.
A lot of the time the people in the audience find that listening to a speaker or participating in a workshop is boring. As the event planner, you should try to think outside the box and find things that people would actually be interested in.
When finding a speaker for your workshop, look for popular speakers with good feedback. Try to find a speaker who uses engaging technology and conveys their information in a fun and exciting way.
You want to find someone that your audience can connect with so they will want to listen or participate. You can find more info about booking the best speaker or workshop for your next corporate event.
Be Flexible
Before you even start planning you should know that things might go wrong and you can’t freak out about them. A good event planner knows that not everything is going to go their way and they learn how to adapt to change.
As a corporate event planner, you need to make room for error. Try to always have a backup plan so if last-minute things change you can fix them. You should always be on your toes and ready to change at any minute.
Work as a Team
Hopefully, as an event planner, you have a team of people who are able and ready to help you. Learning how to work as a team is an awesome skill you will need.
Especially if you are the leader make sure you’re giving some of the tasks to your team. You will find it much easier if you pass off some of your workloads to the people working with you. Try not to micromanage either! This is very offputting and can cause additional unneeded stress to your team.
Even if you are the only one planning the event you still need to be able to work as a team. Your team, in this case, is going to be the caterer, speaker, venue owner, transportation, and so much more.
There are so many people that need to help you pull off a successful event so make sure you’re able to work with each of them.
Small Details
As a corporate event planner, you need to also set aside time to focus on the small details. Ignoring any small details or problems that may come up could spiral into even bigger problems.
A good example of this is table runners. You might not think of something as simple as that for your corporate event. So you might start by looking for cheap table runners for sale and work through each of these small tasks to create a great looking corporate event.
Encourage yourself and your team to spot any small additional details that may be taken care of. This is another reason why communication is key. You want people to speak up and let you know about the small things that you may have overlooked.
One thing you could try is walking through the venue before the event and laying everything out in your head. This way you can walk through the event and see if there are any details you may have missed.
Event Planning Skills
When it comes to planning a corporate event there are many things you need to take into consideration.
Make sure to use your event planning skills to stay on top of all the details that go into making your corporate event a success.
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