You Think You Can Plan an Event? Let's See.
Stop running chaotic events. Use our battle-tested corporate event planning checklist to execute flawlessly and prove ROI. From budget to post-event analysis.
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BacksyAlright, let's cut the crap. You're here because you think running a corporate event is about booking a DJ and ordering enough mini quiches. You're probably staring at a spreadsheet, feeling important, while your event is already on a collision course with mediocrity. Most founders treat events like a necessary evil—a box to check for "marketing." That's why most corporate events are expensive, forgettable monuments to ego.
You think you're listening to your customers? You're not. You're listening to your own assumptions. You're building an event you think they want, and you'll be lucky if it doesn't end up being a ghost town with a huge catering bill. Ignore your customers, and you’ll be lucky to survive the quarter.
This isn't a checklist. It's a founder-to-founder intervention. We're not "exploring best practices." We're dissecting the machine so you stop building something that's destined to blow up on the launchpad. Each step is a filter designed to kill bad ideas before they cost you a fortune.
1. Define Event Objectives and Goals
Stop. Don’t book a venue. Don’t even think about a hashtag. Answer this one question: Why the hell are we doing this? If your answer is "brand awareness" or "lead gen," you've already failed. That's founder-speak for "I have no idea, but it sounds productive." An event without a razor-sharp, measurable goal isn't a strategy; it's an expensive party. You're burning cash for appetizers and small talk.
Your event is a product. It needs a single, core job-to-be-done. Are you trying to cut your sales cycle in half by getting 50 target accounts in one room? That's a goal. Are you trying to reduce customer churn by 10% by teaching them how to use your most powerful feature? That's a goal. "Networking" is not a goal; it's a byproduct of a well-designed event.
Why This Isn't Optional
Skipping this is like building a rocket with no destination. You'll spend a ton of money on fuel, make a lot of noise, and end up crashing in a random field. Without a "why," you can't make a single intelligent decision about the venue, the content, or the guest list. And when your board asks what they got for their $100k, "people seemed to have fun" is how you get your budget torched.
Takeaway: If you can't write your event's primary objective on a cocktail napkin in one, numbers-driven sentence, cancel the event.
2. Create and Manage Event Budget
So, you have a goal. Cute. Now, let's see if you can afford it. The budget isn't a spreadsheet; it's the physics of your event. It's the law of gravity that keeps your grand ambitions from floating off into fantasy land. Treating your budget like a suggestion box is the fastest way to find yourself explaining to your CFO why the "unforeseen" cost of Wi-Fi just ate your entire quarterly marketing spend.
Your budget is a series of strategic bets. Every dollar you spend on a fancy lighting rig is a dollar you can't spend on getting a speaker who can actually draw a crowd. Microsoft's budget for Build isn't just about paying for a convention center; it's a calculated investment in developer loyalty, with every line item ruthlessly scrutinized against that goal. They're not guessing. Why are you?
The Cost of Financial Cowardice
Flying blind on money is malpractice. It means you can't negotiate, you can't prioritize, and you sure as hell can't prove ROI. A detailed budget isn't a leash; it's your weapon. It's the data you use to kill a stakeholder's dumb idea by showing them the trade-off. It’s your proof that you’re a business operator, not just a party planner.
Takeaway: Every line item on your budget must directly serve your primary objective—if it doesn't, it's waste, and you cut it.
3. Select and Secure Venue
The venue isn't a backdrop; it's the operating system for your entire event. Choosing the wrong one is like trying to run modern software on a computer from 1995. It doesn't matter how good the code is; the hardware will kill it. Picking a venue because it's cheap or available is the kind of short-term thinking that guarantees a garbage experience.
The venue is your brand message. Google holds I/O at an amphitheater because it feels open, academic, and a little nerdy—just like their developer culture. A bad venue choice creates a thousand tiny cuts that bleed the life out of your event: awful acoustics, confusing layouts, and soul-crushing beige conference rooms that scream "your life is a series of compromises."
Don't Get Handcuffed by a Building
A bad venue is a cancer. It metastasizes. Bad Wi-Fi kills your event app. Poor accessibility makes you look incompetent. Hidden fees in the contract nuke your budget. You can't fix a fundamentally broken venue with better snacks or a charismatic speaker. You're just putting lipstick on a pig. Even if you're in a unique space, don't let basic comfort slide—if you have to source your own portable luxury toilets, do it. The details matter.
Takeaway: Don't find a venue that can work; find the one that makes your job easier.
4. Develop Content and Agenda
This is it. This is the product. The agenda is the only reason anyone is giving you their time and money. Everything else is just packaging. If your content is weak, you've failed. You've convinced busy people to show up for an empty box. It's about delivering so much goddamn value that people feel stupid for even considering not coming.
Events like HubSpot's INBOUND aren't successful by accident. They are brutal curators. They design an agenda that solves the most painful problems for their target audience. They're not filling slots; they're building an intellectual amusement park. If your agenda reads like a list of your executives talking about themselves, you're not hosting an event; you're hosting a hostage situation.
Respect Their Time or Die
A boring agenda is theft. You're stealing people's time, which is their only non-renewable asset. They came for insights, not a sales pitch disguised as a keynote. If people are on their phones, you've lost. The fancy venue is irrelevant. The gourmet coffee is irrelevant. You broke the one promise that mattered. To keep energy high, don't be afraid to break the monotony with unexpected corporate event entertainment ideas.
Takeaway: If your agenda doesn't make your target attendee feel a palpable sense of FOMO, it's not good enough.
5. Registration and Attendee Management
Your registration page is the front door to your event. If it's clunky, confusing, or looks like it was designed in 2003, you're telling attendees that your event is going to be just as amateurish. This isn't admin work; it's the first test of your competence. A painful registration process is like a restaurant with a filthy entrance—nobody cares how good the food is, they're already grossed out.
This is your central nervous system. It's how you collect data, manage communications, and avoid a chaotic check-in line that makes people hate you before they've even had their morning coffee. Screwing this up is an unforced error. It's a self-inflicted wound that signals to everyone that you don't have your shit together.
The First Impression is the Only Impression
A bad registration flow is pure friction. It kills conversion and projects incompetence. That long, slow-moving line on event day? That's a direct result of your lazy planning. You've created a bottleneck of frustration and anxiety, completely torpedoing the excitement you spent months building. More importantly, this is your first and best chance to get clean data. Garbage in, garbage out.
Takeaway: Your registration should be as fast and frictionless as buying something on Amazon—anything less is a failure.
6. Marketing and Promotion Strategy
So you built the world's greatest event. Who cares? If nobody knows about it, you just built a monument to your own ego in an empty desert. The "if you build it, they will come" fantasy is for people who enjoy going out of business. Marketing isn't something you tack on at the end; it's the engine you build from day one.
Your job isn't to "promote" the event. Your job is to create a gravitational pull. It's to build a narrative so compelling that your target audience sees attendance not as an option, but as a career necessity. You need to make not showing up feel like a strategic disadvantage. This is warfare for attention, and you're probably showing up with a pointy stick.
Hope is Not a Marketing Strategy
Failing to market aggressively is a death sentence. It leads to low attendance, which leads to panicked discount codes that devalue your brand and attract the wrong people. When your CEO asks why the room is half-empty, "we sent a few emails" is the verbal equivalent of a resignation letter. You didn't just fail to get people in the door; you failed to validate the entire premise of the event.
Takeaway: Market your event like you're trying to win an election—be relentless, be everywhere, and have a clear enemy.
7. Technology and AV Planning
Here's the deal: your brilliant keynote speaker is 100% useless if the microphone doesn't work. Tech isn't a "support" function; it is the experience. One flickering projector, one dead link in the live stream, one Wi-Fi network that collapses under pressure, and your entire event instantly transforms from a professional gathering into a cringe-worthy amateur hour.
You think Apple's keynotes look slick by accident? Every single screen transition, audio cue, and camera angle is rehearsed to the point of insanity. They treat the tech with the same reverence as the product they're announcing. You're probably just hoping the hotel's AV guy shows up on time. That's the difference between commanding an audience and being held hostage by a faulty HDMI cable.
Don't Gamble Your Reputation on a Cable
Treating tech as an afterthought is playing Russian roulette with your brand. A tech failure isn't just an inconvenience; it's a public declaration of your incompetence. It tells every person in the room (and watching online) that you don't sweat the details. While your audience is distracted by your failures, they aren't listening to your message. You're burning money to look like a fool.
Takeaway: If you don't have a backup for every critical piece of tech, you're not planning an event; you're planning a disaster.
8. Post-Event Follow-up and Evaluation
The event isn't over when the last person leaves. If you think it is, you're an idiot. That's when the most important work begins. All that energy, all those conversations, all that "buzz"? It has the half-life of a fruit fly. Your post-event strategy is how you capture that energy and turn it into something that actually matters: revenue, data, and loyalty.
This is where you earn your paycheck. It's where you prove to the bean counters that the event wasn't just an expensive field trip. Salesforce doesn't just shut down Dreamforce and go home. They immediately activate a multi-channel machine to nurture every lead and harvest every piece of data. Neglecting this is like a running a marathon and quitting ten feet from the finish line.
The Gold is in the Follow-up
No follow-up means no ROI. It's that simple. You spent a fortune to get all these people in a room, and now you're just going to let that opportunity rot? The feedback you collect in the 24 hours after the event is the most honest, unfiltered Voice of Customer data you will ever get. It's a goldmine. And you're probably going to let it sit in a spreadsheet, unread. Don't be that person. Use good post-event survey questions examples to get real answers.
Takeaway: The event is the catalyst, not the conclusion; your follow-up is where the actual business gets done.
Stop Guessing and Start Listening
So, there it is. A framework to keep you from orchestrating an expensive, public failure. The common thread here isn't logistics; it's listening. Most events are built on a founder's gut feeling, which is usually just a polite term for their biases. This process forces you to listen to the only voice that matters: the customer's.
Every step is a listening opportunity. Your registration numbers are telling you if your marketing message sucks. The Q&A after a session is telling you what your customers are actually confused about. The post-event survey isn't a formality; it's your report card. It's where your attendees tell you, in brutally honest terms, what was a waste of their time and what they'd gladly pay double for next year.
Ignore this feedback, and you're doomed to repeat your mistakes. You'll keep booking the same boring speakers and wondering why nobody seems engaged. You'll keep pouring money into things nobody cares about. You're not planning; you're just guessing with someone else's money. This checklist is your shield against that kind of stupidity. Use it to build an event so good your attendees will do the marketing for you next year.
Stop trying to manually decode what 500 people wrote in your feedback forms and let Backsy show you what your event attendees are really saying in 90 seconds.