1. Understand the needs of your audience as well as the company
With a clear event brief, objectives and desired outcomes, your event will undoubtedly be a success. To shape the event agenda, a pre-event survey was sent out to all employees asking them what areas of wellbeing they were keen to learn more about. Common themes emerged, providing a clear direction for the event content and ensuring it would have meaningful impact. Recognised experts in their fields with TV/media pedigree provided information on avoiding burnout, nutrition, sleep and mindful cocktail making. Sourced from our extensive wellbeing contacts lists, they brought their professional insight, knowledge and advice to two Q&A sessions. Our aim was to provide talks that were interactive, actionable and easy to understand, with the key deliverable of providing the attendees with tips that they could take away and action in both their work and home lives.2. Putting the experiential into your event drives engagement
Making an event, no matter the format or size, experiential is key to making it a success and achieving your original objectives. The event experience will keep attendees engaged, interested, actively participating, and ultimately able to reap the rewards and learnings from the day in an enjoyable way. And finding the right venue that suits your needs, brand and budget is key! For our Velo Live event, we wanted something offsite but local, with the right space for all the activities we were doing but that was on brand and with socialising space. With over 20 years of experience curating multiple events to different objectives, we knew the perfect venue that was priced to suit our budget. Dressed in a Christmassy vibe, with one area for the sessions/workshops, another area for breaks and refreshments and space for the final team activity, it perfectly fit the brief! After a series of talks and Q&A, we ended the day with a team-building, hands-on, mindful drinking session and non-alcoholic cocktail making masterclass! Finding scaffolding tables we could hire ensured we had 25 people and all their cocktail making equipment together, watching the instructor and making their own drinks. All hosted by a TV personality and cocktail maker from Sunday Brunch!3. Prepare to be flexible
Live events are exciting, engaging, interactive, and as the name suggests…live! Things don’t always run smoothly, but years of experience in delivering live events has taught us that there is always a solution, always a fix, and at the end of the day, the audience will never know what goes on behind the scenes and still have the same amazing experience! In Covid times, this is certainly the case where speaker line ups change at the last minute, zoom is required rather than an in-person guest, but all things are achievable whilst still delivering on the same objectives. Building relationships with venues, suppliers, contractors and speakers has enabled us to have a trusted network of people we can count on, and who are ready to move mountains to deliver live events…and that’s something we pride ourselves on!4. Keep the outcomes in mind
Putting on an event is one thing but ensuring it actually achieves the objectives you set out to achieve is another. Really understanding those objectives in the first place helps to curate the right type of event and content and that’s certainly what happened here at Velo Live. Our original aims were to:- bring our employees together face-to-face and have time together out of the office/work-from-home environment
- deliver a positive, fun, shared experience
- focus on meaningful content and wellbeing topics that our employees wanted to learn about
- provide access to experts with knowledge that could help everyone improve their wellbeing in their own unique way
- Do something just for THEM!
Further reading
What I learned attending “Live Well at Velo”, our latest staff well-being event
B2B events are back, but not as we knew them