Organising a successful business conference
Organising a successful business conference is a time consuming and challenging responsibility. Whether you’re aiming to promote new products or services, generate new income streams or educate delegates in a particular subject, you’ll want your guests to leave with positive thoughts and memories of a successful event, but what can you do to make it more interesting?Events by Knight are passionate about designing, planning, preparing and organising your successful business conference. We know the importance of being able to excite, engage and inspire, and importantly how to put these elements into practice. Here we share our top 10 tips for organising a successful business conference.
Make it unique
As your delegates probably attend numerous conferences over the course of the year, you’ll need to stand out from the crowd and be different.Try and select an unusual venue and make it appeal to your guests. You could perhaps make their arrival memorable by the use of special effect lighting or an appropriately chosen piece of music. The key is to be unique, inspire and captivate your guests.
Use exciting promotional material
Using promotional material is an ideal opportunity to communicate with your guests, so you need to get your message across in a lively and entertaining way. Before the event you could adopt a multi-channel targeted approach, incorporating social media messages to enthuse your guests.
Personalise it
Guests will always remember a personalised event. Perhaps you could provide each delegate with a goody bag of branded items or a personalised note book. These types of gifts tend to be well-received, leaving guests with a positive reminder of your event, products and services.
Give your conference a consistent theme
For larger events you could make your conference visually interesting by co-ordinating corporate colours through lighting, décor, themed pens etc. You could also introduce a theme or style to refreshments, either a certain type of cuisine or food and drink associated with the season.
Create interaction
Conferences aren’t generally known for being interactive. On the contrary, they can become rather dull with presentation after presentation and often rather uninspiring content. Instead incorporate workshops which encourage participation, Q&A sessions or create debate.You could allow delegates to tweet comments and observations live onto a large screen. These document your event, allow everyone to feel involved and enables those who perhaps were unable to attend to also feel included in the proceedings.
Introduce a quiz
Introducing a quiz format not only encourages interaction and participation but injects a bit of fun while getting your message across. Make it relevant to the subject area by creating polls where your delegates can vote on answers to a selection of questions.
Select inspiring speakers
Take time to research and choose your event speakers carefully. Remember, the best are likely to be booked up many months in advance, so the earlier you can hire your speakers, the better. If they can deliver dynamic, engaging content, perhaps with a fresh approach or humourous overtone, your delegates may see things in a new light and remember your event for longer.
Lightning talks
Lightning talks give your speakers a limited amount of time to make their presentation. For this to work effectively, they need to be concise and make their points clearly, avoiding any unnecessary information. In turn, this will help to keep your delegates focused as well as giving more speakers an opportunity to present.
Silent disco type talks
Multiple speakers can speak at once with delegates choosing which to listen to through the use of wireless headphones. In this way they can be assured of listening to subjects of personal interest and also switch between different speakers as they wish.
Ideas Soapbox
Providing a platform for your delegates to put their ideas forward encourages debate and the ability to share appropriate research on projects which will interest the audience. These types of informal sessions should ideally have a limited time slot.Events by Knight believe the key to a successful business conference is to be innovative. Most conferences seem to follow a tried and tested sequence which can easily become boring as your guests will have experienced it before. We strive to make the impossible a reality – conferences and corporate events your guests will be eager to attend.We’ll listen to your thoughts and ideas and then create a professional industry-led conference which will guarantee your guests leave with a positive impression of your company, brand, product or service.
Get In Touch
Need some help with your conference planning? Not sure where to start? Get in touch with our dedicated team who will be able to chat things over with you.
Email: info@eventsbyknight.co.uk or call +44(0)20 3130 4040