Organizarea Evenimentelor cu o Agentie Specializata sau cu o Echipa Interna: PRO si CONTRA

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

Organizing your company's conferences is a repetitive challenge for the management team and division managers involved in the process. We pick among the main arguments we have gathered from the market to present you the most important ones:

- At each edition, we need to find new ways and activities to involve participants in the conference agenda and objectives. Exposure to repetitive agendas, long speeches, etc. bores participants and reduces their ability to take ownership of learning points. In a past article we mentioned the importance of creating an experience.

- Participants are asking 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! We have learned this from Deloitte human capital research results.

- Budgets tend to remain (at best) constant. From year to year, companies observe the fulfillment of a conference's objectives using a specific budget. Logical thinking prevents companies from increasing this budget.

So, the challenge is to create different experiences, suitable for the participants and continuously updated to the company 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 takes on its solution!

If you choose to organize your conferences with a specialized agency, you can starts from the premise that the organizer is up to date with the trends in the events industry, has several partnership relationships in the market and bases its proposed solutions on proven experience.

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

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

Finally, as you may have noticed, I did not address the subject of budget. The reason is simple: we have seen very different cases - often organizing an event with an agency does not increase the budget, because the organizer's margin is counterbalanced by the better prices they get. Equally, there are many cases where an in-house team ends up giving up certain quality elements of the event more easily in order to stay within budget.

What have we learned? Each case is different and should be treated as such, but the healthiest thing is to take a healthy approach at least o parere avizata a unei agentii de evenimente atunci cand luati decizia cu privire la cine este organizatorul perfect pentru aceasta editie a evenimentului vostru!