Corporate Event Planning: What are you really buying?

Published August 11, 2016 | By ncmarsh

Corporate Event Planning: What are you really buying?

“Start with why. Simon Sinek

$36,400.

That is the cost of putting a meal in front of 800 seats at the Raleigh Convention Center. That is, if we choose a plated chicken and salmon duo with two hosted beers. If we go for the fillet and the sea scallops, the cost is $52,800.

To put that number in context: in 2014, which is the most current year with available data as I write this, the median income in the United States was $51,939 according to the US census. That means that somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000,000 Americans, half of our adult population, work for an entire year and earn less than we are asking our clients to spend on one meal, through one comparatively affordable vendor.

Event stakeholders can hire a full-time worker, for an entire year, for less than we ask them to spend on one meal.

That is just the food and beverage. Once we factor in flights, accommodation, décor, AV, creative production, entertainment, speaker, insurance it can quickly enter six or seven figures for a single night.

Three hours later: the food has been eaten (or thrown out), the production gear is packed into road cases and being rolled to the dock, the chairs are stacked, the room is empty.

Only one thing remains: the emotional experience of the audience.

Event stakeholders are not paying for food. They are not paying for AV. They are not paying for décor. They are not paying for entertainment. They are not paying for insurance. They are not paying for security. They are not paying for hotel space.

Event stakeholders are paying for access to the intellect and imagination of their audience. They are paying to create an experience so immersive that their content will crawl into the guest’s brain and lodge there as securely as it can.

At the end of the day, the event happens inside the mind of the audience — and the effectiveness of live events depends directly on our ability to captivate that group of guests.

Tweet: “The event happens inside the mind of the audience”

Let’s look at the connection between a captivating live event and the bottom line in the case of three basic varieties of events: an internal corporate training, an association conference, and a client-facing corporate event (i.e. customer dinner, user group conference, product launch, trade show booth, etc.)

An Internal Corporate Training:

The stakeholder is investing in the event because they want their team to continually improve. They are covering travel expenses, investing in all of the logistical costs that accompany a live event, potentially investing significant sums in outside training and losing the productivity that is missed while employees are engaged with the event rather than their day-to-day tasks.

If human beings were machines employees could have educational content simply uploaded like a software update without incurring the travel and other expenses. With people, the issue is not simply having the material in front of them, the issue is how effectively they learn it. The group makes the significant investment in the live event because the emotional engagement that happens within the room when the team is together in real time deepens the learning, bonds them closer as a group, and improves their ability to effectively work and communicate with each other.

That means that the more emotionally and intellectually present the attendees; the more effective the event.

The moment a guest’s thinking strays to issues at home, the night’s basketball game, the election, or all the sales calls she is missing by being at a training, money is flying out the window.

The profitability of the event — in the sense of the outcome achieved per dollar spent — depends first on our ability to captivate the audience.

Let’s look at that in the context of a few different kinds of events.

An Association Conference:

Live events are typically the most significant drivers of revenue for an association. They are also where both the learning and human connection (the phrase I much prefer to “networking”) that are the raison d’être for these groups happen.

For the association to continue to grow (as one of my parents’ neighbors in the Appalachian Mountains put it to me one Summer: “things either grow or decay; they never stay the same”) attendees must want to sell their boss on continuing to send annual checks, and covering the expense of attendance.

This means both delivering maximum value in the content of the sessions and creating an experience that brings guests closer together so they have a vested interest in returning to their tribe next year.

The more immersive the experience, the more association members are fully engaged intellectually and emotionally with the event, the stronger both of those outcomes will be. Here again, the profitability of the event first hinges on its ability to captivate attendees.

Client-facing Corporate Event

At these events — product launches, customer dinners, user group conferences — the ultimate goal is for attendees to do business with the organizing sponsor, whether it is a new sale or the continuation of a long relationship. Attendee attention is again money in the bank, but here in the basic form of checks being written to the organization.

The most bare example of this is the trade show booth. Trade shows are hyper-competitive events where the costs of not engaging attendees become clearest. Streams of attendees move by, the organizers who win are those who are able to create an experience so captivating that it stops guests from walking by, makes them want to come in, and engages them to the extent that a real conversation can eventually happen. But that content cannot begin to be consumed without first earning the audience’s attention — and here, if you don’t do it, they’ll just move to the next booth.

While the trade show booth allows you to watch the consequences of losing the audience’s attention; the costs are just as high at every other event type within the client-facing category. Every second that an audience at a product launch isn’t immersed in your world — absorbing your message — is money wasted.

The Bottom Line: If you aren’t grabbing your attendees and shaking them out of the “seen-it-all” haze of corporate events and conventions: your money is flying out the door.

Sharing your passion for fascinating live events,

The Best is Yet to come!