Stakeholder Management for Corporate Event Planners

Planning a corporate event can be a daunting task, especially when managing stakeholder expectations is at the forefront. 

Ensure your event meets your stakeholders' expectations is the best way to ensure you will be seen as running a successful event strategy.

Understanding Stakeholder Expectations

First and foremost, you need to understand your stakeholders' visions and requirements. This isn’t just limited to corporate events, but you should be understanding their targets, what they could be bonuses on and the direction of the business. 

For example, if your company is focused on Growth, you need to ensure you events run with a blend of customer acquisition or customer retention. If your team is focused on reach and brand awareness, you could start hosting webinars and lead people into a future option of a small, tailored event that matches your brand.

Here are some basic to keep things smooth:

• Conduct meetings well ahead of the event to discuss their expectations.
• Keep asking questions until you understand their expectations.
• Ensure you agree with them. If they are challenging that is fine, but if they are unrealistic, keeping quite is a great way to miss target.
• Ensure regular communication to keep them updated with the preparations. While you can under-communicate, you can almost never over-communicate.

Types of Event Stakeholders

While we mainly focus on internal stakeholders, there are a range of individuals and groups you need to consider and plan to engage with in order to run a successful event. These may include:

• Manager, Management and Executive teams
• Team mates
• Marketing
• Design
• Legal
• Venues
• AV providers
• Caterers
• Guests
• Media and PR partners

Maintaining Transparent Communication

Maintaining transparency and open lines of communication with stakeholders is integral. Here are the ways to foster it:

• Update them with regular progress reports.
• Discuss any challenges that you may face and propose mitigation strategies.
• Ensure they are aware of their role and responsibilities in the event planning and execution process.

Negotiating and Managing Changes

In any event planning scenario, changes are inevitable. Handling changes gracefully and ensuring stakeholders are happy with the amendments is necessary. These tips may help:

• Prepare stakeholders in advance that some changes may be necessary.
• Try to negotiate changes in a way that will have the minimum possible impact on the overall plan.
• If some expectations are not feasible, present alternative solutions that still meet the overall objectives of the event.

Risk Planning in Events

Ensuring you have considered some of the major negative, and positive, risks. These could be things like weather impacting turn up rates, emails not hitting inboxes, print runs not running to schedule or needing to change the venue. 

By planning for these major risks you are able to add an extra layer to your events that your manager, management and organisation will find valuable.

Manage your external stakeholders

Just because you don’t report to someone doesn’t mean they aren’t a stakeholder. Ensuring regular communication with vendors your are going to use again is a great way to build trust and will make those rate negotiations much easier. This is something we take as a core value at BizziEvents, where we use our size to ensure our clients get great deals on their events.

Stakeholder Engagement Strategies

Some of our favourite ways to engage are:

• Regular status updates (Monday or Friday)
• Event Reports
• Event Calendars via shared tools
• Monthly catch-ups with other teams, including informal tea in the lunch room
• Following a strict meeting agenda

Whatever the type of corporate event you run, making sure you are engaging with the relevant stakeholders is a way to ensure you are hitting your own targets.