by Victor Georgescu, M.I.C.E. Division Manager

Organizing conferences within your company is a repetitive challenge for the management team and for the division managers involved in this process. We stand out among the main arguments that we collected from the market to present the most important ones:

– At each edition, new methods and activities must be found to involve the participants in the agenda and objectives of the conference. Exposure to repetitive agendas, long speeches, etc. it bores the participants by reducing their ability to acquire learning points themselves. In a previous article I mentioned the importance of creating an experience.

– Participants demand more and more from the event. As people get used to a level of quality, they will demand more and more – it’s human nature! I learned this from the results of the Deloitte research on human capital.

– Budgets tend to remain (at best) constant. From year to year, companies observe the fulfillment of the objectives of a conference using a specific budget. The logical thinking of companies prevents them from increasing this budget.

Therefore, the challenge is to create different experiences, suitable for the participating people and continuously updated to the company’s context, in a budget that cannot grow gradually. Thus, we end up using tools from the sphere of creativity, technology or even team building, applying concrete knowledge about the social and economic environment of the employee and the company. This challenge is a complex one, for any team that undertakes to solve it!

If you choose to organize conferences with a specialized agency, you can start from the premise that the organizer is aware of trends in the events industry, has several partnership relationships in the market and bases its proposed solutions on previously demonstrated experiences.

If you choose to organize conferences with an internal team, it will connect more easily to the needs of the participants, they will know better the current status of the company and it will be easier for them to connect the atmosphere of the conference to the organizational culture (assuming that this culture is strong and known by to employees).

On the other hand, organizing with an internal team involves displacing those people from their main role and recalibrating daily priorities. For the employee, it can be either a welcome change or the opposite, depending on the personality, but also on how this opportunity is presented to him.

Finally, as you noticed, I did not address the subject of the budget. The reason is simple: I have seen very varied cases – often organizing an event with an agency does not increase the budget, because the organizer’s margin is counterbalanced by the better prices he obtains. In the same way, there are many cases in which an internal team ends up giving up with greater ease certain quality elements of the event, with the aim of fitting into the budget.

What have we learned? Each case is different and should be treated as such, but the healthiest is to get at least an approved opinion of an event agency when making the decision about who is the perfect organizer for this edition of your event!