Combining Your Conference and Christmas Party

An increasing number of our clients are asking about combining their conference and Christmas party this year, and we don’t think this is a passing phase.

It’s also not too late for you to make sure your ‘Christmas Party’ delivers on many more levels this year.  

Previously, corporate Christmas party planning has always been a mega project in its own right, with its own events budget, date and venue.  

But now, mainly due to budget pressure and a general desire to make sure we’re all doing things for a good reason; different versions of the same question keep cropping up: Do the annual conference, staff awards, and Christmas party belong in one day?

We think it makes sense to challenge the status quo and have genuine conversations to make sure you’re being strategic about what you’re doing.  Things to consider are:

• Combining an internal conference with a party
• Can you run staff awards and a Christmas party on the same night?
• How to save money with year-end multi-purpose corporate events
• How combining your conference and Christmas party helps justify spend to finance

Chances are you’re asking the same questions if you’re the person holding this budget and responsibility. So let’s look behind the curtain.

What’s Behind the Rise of Holding a Christmas Party and Annual Conference Together?

We’re seeing a few patterns showing up repeatedly whilst every area of the business is starting to work smarter:

• Finance teams are asking why the business runs a leadership retreat, an awards dinner, and a staff party separately in Q4, when venue hire, catering, AV, accommodation and other associated venue costs can be procured more favourably with a single supplier.
• HR teams want the year-end celebration to carry more weight than a run-of-the-mill jolly. They want their staff recognition event ideas taken into consideration which don’t include managers with a microphone and a list of names as an afterthought when everybody’s already hit the dancefloor.
• Leadership wants the whole company to hear where the business stands and befitting celebrations
• Sustainability champions understand that live events have an unavoidable travel carbon impact so how can we reduce the number of times the business has to take that ‘hit’ on their footprint

These combined factors are cooking up a perfect storm for businesses nationwide.

Why are More Businesses Combining the Conference and Christmas Party Now?

Three things are converging at once and making a case for combining your conference and Christmas party:

1. Budget scrutiny has tightened across most sectors this year and events are an easy target when finance reviews spend. For this reason, combined events under one roof on one date reduces duplicate costs on venue hire, production, travel, and also staff time away from the office.
2. Hybrid and remote teams mean the whole company is rarely in one room. So, businesses are reluctant to waste the occasion on a single purpose when everybody finally gathers.
3. Staff retention and recognition are higher on the leadership agenda. Accordingly, a combined staff awards and Christmas party with business updates and visible recognition is more intentional than routine.

But how do you pull all these strands together to satisfy different stakeholder groups with different objectives?

How to Get Optimal Bangs Per Buck from Your Year End Staff Celebration

Certain decisions are key to working your budget hard and none of these decisions involve venue selection or the menu:

• Objective first – Get crystal clear on what the business needs from this event before you start looking at venues. Is your focus on recognition, business updates, morale, retention, or all these things? In any event, the format should follow the objective, not the other way round.
• Separate the tone, not the events – A leadership update at 3.00pm and a party at 7.00pm share a venue and suppliers, but not an atmosphere. The room needs to reset, the AV brief needs to switch, and the energy needs to ramp up, without too much unnecessary and gruelling break down and set up under time pressure.
• Actively Produce the whole event – too often the ‘dinner’ part of an event is where planners have run out of steam and it’s left up the venue staff to get everyone fed and the DJ to get them dancing.  That’s not good enough anymore; especially if the daytime event was a properly thought out conference and recognition.  Use a Creative Producer to design the whole night; give it a structure, a personality and make it make sense!
• Incorporate recognition into the structure early – Awards presented mid-evening, with proper lighting and sound, have more gravitas than rushed announcements between courses or a closing speech.
• Brief your suppliers on the full picture – Your venue, caterer, AV team, and entertainment providers will only plan for the evening party if they only know about the evening party. Whereas the entire vibe is different if a director’s presenting figures at 4.00pm before 300 people arrive for dinner at 7.30pm. In our experience as a leading B2B event management agency, it’s better for everybody involved to approach multi-purpose corporate events as one operation rather than two or three competing ones. 

What Matters Most When Combining Your Internal Conference and Party?

Ask yourself this one question before the next budget conversation – If you’re seriously thinking about combining your conference and Christmas party this year, what would the business save, and what would engage your people most?

At Brightspace Events, we’re an independent, founder led corporate event agency working on multiple large scale B2B events annually. So, this kind of combined planning is our daily bread. 

Get in touch if any the points raised in this article sounds familiar and you want a second opinion on your December plans. We’re always happy to talk and offer a compelling range of both full service and modular support you might not expect.