Award ceremonies, corporate awards, and fun galas are a great way to recognize the best worker in the industry. Whether it is the end year corporate award ceremony or any customer appreciation event. They are an excellent opportunity to further promote brand awareness, develop new partnerships and even start a fund-raising campaign. However, organizing such extravagant events requires an extensive amount of planning. Therefore, to pull of award ceremonies most successfully you might have to plan throughout the year. If you are going to host such award ceremonies, then this article would help you to understand how you could create an impact.
Early Planning:
If you want your award ceremony to be perfect, then you need to start planning at least nine to ten months earlier. Like any other event, you need to invest time upfront and then worry about the result. Anything that was done in a haste always lacks proper arrangement. You are always catching up on things that are either very irritating or put a lot of pressure on you. Therefore, define the specifics of the event, set some realistic goals and try to achieve them in minimum possible time.
Following A Timeline:
Overseeing such huge award ceremonies, you must plan each and everything. The first step that you should take is to get organized. Setting up different milestones and making deadlines, would ensure that the event goes smoothly. Get in touch with the stakeholders to determine the scope of the event, resources required and deliverables. Write down all the tasks to be achieved during each phase so that their execution is flawless. Try to break down some tasks into mini projects such as booking caterers, securing a venue, dealing with Lighting Hire companies and assign them to the management team.
Assess the Market:
Before you dive into the planning of the award ceremony you need to assess the market of your industry. Determine when your competitors hold their award ceremonies and what other events are happening in the industry. these factors would decide how saturated the industry is with award programs. Therefore, it is important to see all these factors before planning the ceremony. So that you don’t have to face any difficulties with event marketing.
Form A Budget:
People tend to get over-excited with such a large event and end up spending more than they anticipated. Therefore, it is necessary to form a budget before the planning starts. Associating a certain amount of funds to each category would help you to select the best possible service providers. Your budget should include key items such as the cost of the venue, food, beverage, décor, entertainment, security, and audio-visual equipment. All these things can range from the cheapest to the most expensive. So, to avoid any extra burning of the money you need to allocate a certain amount to each category.
Marketing Cost:
Most of the award ceremony organizers tend to forget the cost of marketing they are going to bear. Where marketing is important to promote your event and to gain the attention of people it could be very costly at the same time. Depending on the reach that you want to have the marketing budget could become very expensive. Therefore, the best way to ensure the best marketing is by getting a sponsor. Moreover, if you failed to do so than there are many ways such as email marketing, social media marketing, and other digital marketing techniques. But for that, you must spend a lot of time and effort into it. So, the best way forward is to get your event associated with a popular sponsor and enjoy their existing personal relations.
Form A Planning Committee:
Being the head organizer of an award ceremony, you must arrange a dedicated team to help you with planning. As discussed earlier that planning is the most crucial part of award ceremonies, therefore utilize all the help you could get. Moreover, getting the help of skilled volunteers would reduce your stress levels which in return improves your productivity. Assign roles and responsibilities to each team member and make them realize their importance. Assign certain team leads under which a small number of individual works. Make those teams responsible for certain aspects of the ceremony. In this way, the responsibility is divided among the committee and every task is achieved in an optimum way.
Secure A Venue and Date:
One of the biggest issues that any event organizer face is that they can’t find a suitable venue. Either the options available to them are expensive or do not have to capacity to hold such extravagant events. start your search for venues as early as possible and try to look for such a place that provides catering and audio-visual services. This will eliminate some of your responsibilities such as hiring a private caterer and Lighting Hire company.
The selection of the date is as important as the venue selection. You must make sure that the date of the award ceremony doesn’t coincide with any national or religious holiday. Also, look for any similar category event happening closer to your event date. If that is the case, then your ceremony might not be able to gain much attention.
Award Categories:
The primary purpose of any award ceremony is to show appreciation and to recognize the efforts of the people. Before making any nomination determine the categories that you want to give awards in. But remember one thing that the more categories you have the longer the event is going to be. You don’t want to spend most of more than two hours on this awards presentation as it could make the event boring and dull. Determine whether you want the winners to deliver speeches or not. If they want to deliver a speech, then add a time limit so that they don’t end up taking most of the ceremony time.
Media coverage:
You want your award ceremony to be covered through main media channels. As the main purpose of such events is to promote your organization and to gain new potential customers. Moreover, your sponsor demands such type of publicity. Therefore, there is nothing much better than national media coverage. Get your event partnered up with a media channel so that your company gets truly benefited from such a big investment.
