Summer Corporate Business Events can be an absolute blast! We don’t mean if your Annual General Meeting or Grand Opening happen to take place in the summer. We mean the good, old-fashioned Company Picnics. The kind of work event that is held just to show your employees how much you value them and how much you value their families for supporting them throughout the year.
To get your colleagues pumped about coming, you need to get them interested. You get them interested by picking a theme. If guests know a theme beforehand, they can get creative with the dress code, they speculate with each other about which activities there will be, what kind of food, entertainment, activities, will there be a DJ, should I bring my rubber chicken, that kind of thing. This kind of thought and chatter gets them involved right from the Invitation and they get excited about coming.
So how to pick a theme. The best themes are the ones that are chosen specifically to highlight the reasons why you’re planning this event. Bright Ideas can help you determine your top objectives and use these as inspirational guidelines in suggesting themes.
Recently, to achieve objectives sent to us by a long term client, Bright Ideas produced one of the most exciting summer events in our history by taking everyone to the races: High Tea at Ascot!
This was a brilliant theme because by finding inspiration from a world-famous horse race track, there was no end to the fun and theme-appropriate games we customized for the kids. And by choosing a theme with a flair for fashion, we got all the big kids involved, too. There were cocktail dresses, tail coats, top hats, sun hats, bow ties, canes, corsages, gloves, and oh it was obvious that everyone had a great time not just planning their outfit, but color-coordinating the whole family, too! Planning their outfits demonstrates how excited they were before the event, and that is one huge success!
A second and equally important success is when your guests are still talking about the fun they had weeks or months later. Developing a brand for your event is also important so that guests associate all their memories around this one image. This image can be used in the design of the invitations and other pre-event advertising, in the signage posted around the event, or how about in the background of the photo booth images? You can even incorporate it into any items that you are giving away as guests depart, such as embroidering it onto bow ties for the men, creating your own sticker to put on bottles of bubbles for the kids, and definitely on the prizes won at any of the activities. Simply by developing an event brand, anything you have produced for your event becomes a keepsake and hold memories of this year’s unique summer Company Picnic event.
And finally, to really bring the theme of High Tea at Ascot alive, we incorporated it into as many aspects of the event itself as we could. We had a station filled with beads and feathers and glue where women and girls could create their own fascinator and then enter it into a fashion show. We served Devonshire cream on biscuits, among other tasty and appropriate goodies. We developed a race brochure complete with the race agenda and hilarious names for each horse entered. Even our Track Announcer – the man who announces and calls all races – was dressed to the nines and put on a very posh British accent. We found endless inspiration in this theme and inserted it absolutely everywhere!
So if you’re planning this year’s summer company event, we hope you now agree that a theme is a must: it generates interest and boosts attendance; directs your creativity; creates a cohesive event; and creates memories by causing your guests to remember each year by its theme.
And as ‘theme’ is a Bright Ideas hallmark and specialty, we know we can make your next company picnic something to remember. It would be a “bright idea” to call us today to start brainstorming for a theme for your upcoming Company Picnic this summer.
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