Whether you are hosting an internal conference between the multiple different regional offices or departments across the country for them to show off what they are doing to your potential customers, or whether you are hosting a trade show or industry showcase for others within the same field or to potential customers, it’s a great way to not only raise your companies profile within your own professional community but can also greatly assist with your brand recognition and help establish you as an expert and industry leader within your customer’s minds, helping them to helpfully match your companies name and mission to your logo and colour scheme.
But you may also be aware that planning an event of this scale and for this amount of people can be quite a logistical and practical nightmare to get organized. Rather than fretting on the big things about your day, it’s probably better to get them sniped away early. As often with these kinds of events, everything really rests on the little details that you may overlook. So let’s look at some of these facets that require double-checking and resolution before everything kicks off.
Seating
This is something that you probably have thought over already, but just give it another thought. After all the chances are that if your event is free then it will attract a fairly large attendance as people both from your industry and your potential customers will all hopefully want to come and see what it is you have to offer and you will need seating to house them if you plan on spending a portion of the event listening to guest speakers and members of your team give presentations. Rather than hanging your guests out to dry and making them hover around the back as this could make them feel unwanted.
So make sure that you have a talk with your furniture hire company and make sure that you discuss overflow chairs with them and as a general rule of thumb, we would recommend hiring out at least 30 extra chairs, maybe even more if it is a particularly large event with a heavy yes ratio of RSVPs. Although naturally there are something’s that you can’t predict about the exact attendance of your event, and your guest5s will understand if what you are offering is so popular that you run out of even the overflow chairs, after all, standing room after a certain point really is better than no room if what you are getting out of it is valuable to you.
Sound
Now if you are planning on having guest and in house speakers (and really why you wouldn’t, it’s a great opportunity for you to connect your ideas with your audience and industry directly) then it is absolutely vital that it is very easy to hear them. After all, if you are p0otentially listening to the same person for 20 minutes they chances are if you can’t hear him you will either make your guests uncomfortable by trying to strain to listen to what they have to say, frustrated by the way that they are missing chunks of vital information and eventually most people would quite understandably lose all interest and end up walking away from the speaker altogether.
Unless you want your audience to walk away from your products and ideas then it’s absolutely vital that you get a quality sound system and PA organized from a reputable and specialized AV equipment hire company who should be able to provide you with all of the necessary equipment that you are lacking and in some cases, they can even offer professional sound engineers to come along to your event and master and mix all of the audio and correctly distribute it across the different speakers within the system that you are using. So make sure that you talk to the venue and figure out what they don’t have that you need and get on the phone to your best local supplier to see how they can help you.
Conclusion
In all the most important take away that you can have from an event, is visual and audio. If you look and sound the part and people find value in what you are talking about they are far more likely to engage with you as a business and trust in your expertise.
