5 Tips When You're Organising An Interstate Event

If you've been tasked with planning an interstate corporate event, this may or may not be easy for you based on whether a) you've got contacts in that state and b) how complex your event is going to be.

1. How much lead time do you have?
The more lead time you have, the more time you have to research suppliers and compare costs. Remember the old saw: you can have good, fast or cheap but pick any two.

A short lead time forces you to choose a venue which typically has its own furniture, cutlery, napery, decorations, catering, AV, music and so on to save time. And if they don't have all these elements in-house, they have a solid preferred supplier list to pull the event together for you. A longer lead time will give you more options, but also, higher expectations from the C-suite because of the length of time spent planning it

2. How many guests are you having?
If Covid-19 taught us anything, it's that smaller events are more agile and less likely to be cancelled due to the capacity issues.

Determine the point of the event: a Christmas staff party clearly must include all employees while a VIP cocktail event to thank key clients, or even a product launch luncheon to invite influencers and journalists to help promote your new product can involve much smaller guest numbers.

3. What sort of venue do you need?
Your venue will provide so many cues and clues to your guests that it is absolutely vital to get it right.

Consider the time of day, the day of the week, and the location. If you wish to be perceived as a market innovator, you simply cannot book a city hotel function room.

Originality of venue choice is paramount. If, on the other hand, your brand stands for stability, security and reassurance, this type of venue may be utterly perfect.

4. Is it a roadshow type event?
If say, you're from Brisbane, Sydney or Adelaide and you've been tasked to put together a seamless, coordinated event which features the same elements in each city, such as for a multi-city product launch including Melbourne, you need to carefully consider what elements can be hired, custom-made and/or transported easily between each city.

Many event businesses closed down or sold off excess hire products to earn revenue during the two years of Covid-19 lockdown so you cannot assume you can hire the same type of items from city to city in Australia.

5. Do you really need to theme it to each city?
The vast majority of guests will of course attend only the event scheduled for their own city; if they live in Sydney and attend that event, they are quite unlikely to attend the same event in Melbourne.

This not only frees you up to hire what's available in each city, it also may help you attract much more attention on Instagram, facebook, tiktok, and Youtube for example, because you've got something new to show guests and potential customers in other cities.

Just think: if you use exactly the same decor, flowers, food, promotions, musicians, venue type, sensory gimmicks etc etc in each city to create a seamless, coordinated event, what this means in reality is that the first city launch will garner all the attention on social media because it's fresh and new: no-one has seen it before.

But social media is global - so if it looks identical in the next city in the roadshow, there will naturally be correspondingly less interest as it has been (all) seen before...

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