Welcome to Part 3 of our 4 Part Blog Series! We are pleased to offer our readers insight into the key things we consider when planning corporate events at Bright Ideas. This week will focus on Activities.
Bright Ideas knows the challenges when it comes to hosting corporate events and including crowd-pleasing activities. We understand that a key challenge experienced by our clients is finding ways to keep guests involved and entertained. Solving this challenge begins by understanding the difference between activities and entertainment: activities are something that your guests DO and entertainment is something that your guests WATCH.
Nowadays your guests want an “experiential element” at your event. Think of the Rain Forest Café: your five senses are stimulated by lush jungle foliage, running water, smells of the forest, and sounds of animals in the distance. Great experiential events get talked about because they stand out – a crucial factor in creating a successful event.
There are two kinds of event activities; passive and interactive. Passive activities are set up for your guests to enjoy at their leisure such as a Caricature Artist, a Photo Booth and a CD Recording Booth, etc. Examples of interactive activities are Game Shows, PartyHats, Improv Acts and Casinos. Your best bet is to have an agenda that offers a mix of these fun activities to encourage mixing and mingling as guests socialize.
Team-building activities are also a great way to get people interacting at your next event. The best type of team-building activity is unstructured. We usually recommend activities where guests are placed on a team at the start of the event, branch off individually throughout the event, and then regroup at the end. This combination gives guests the sense of working/playing as a team, with enough autonomy to “do their own thing” as well. An example might be to assign guests to a team at the beginning of the event and as they are enjoying the interactive activities themselves, they are also contributing points to their team.
Getting your groove on is also a good tactic if you want to add some fun and frivolity to the agenda. After dinner at your next event, hold a dance contest. Ask guests to stand on an LED dance platform and use their feet to touch colored arrows laid out in a cross pattern which change based on musical and visual cues. Guests are judged on how well they time their dance to the pattern changes and get to choose new music and keep going if they receive a passing score.
But here is a cautionary note: don’t “over stimulate” your guests with so many things to do and see that it is not enjoyable. The best thing to do is to have everyone watch the main entertainment attraction at one time and then afterwards have several activities going on at the same time. This scheduling works really well because you don’t want to give away all of your “surprises” when guests first arrive by having all of the entertainment and activities on full display. You should also schedule activities throughout the night, so guests are being offered something new and fresh to enjoy. Then, once you have done all of this, make sure you give them a social media outlet to share their “cool” event experiences online with friends, colleagues, and family. Your success will spread like wild fire!
If you want to have an amazing event that includes all kinds of entertainment and activities, call us and we would be happy to share our “Bright Ideas” with you to make your next event show stopping!
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Part 1 of our 4 Part Blog Series
