11 Killer Ideas for Hosting Community Events

A community event is an amazing opportunity for people to get to know each other and connect. It is a way to understand each other and build a stronger foundation for your homes. The trick is to choose the best theme or option for your community event for it to be successful.

If you are planning to organise one, here are 11 killer community event ideas that you can choose from!

1. Seasonal Community Event Ideas

 A great general idea is to take into consideration the current season.

2. Christmas Carolling in December

Be vocal! Get together with other members of the community to go Christmas carolling in December during the holidays. This is a great way to foster community spirit. You can even have various groups singing at different areas of the community on different dates so that more people can get involved and you can cover more ground.

3. Pumpkin Carving Contest

 

A great community event idea for Halloween is to host a pumpkin carving contest. It is good for those with a healthy competitive spirit. For the kids, you can have a pumpkin painting contest as well so they can have fun and get involved. Display all entries where everyone in the community can admire them.

4. Easter Egg Hunting

Easter is one of the most popular holidays for kids, so why not host an Easter Egg Hunting event? Get some of the adults together to paint and hide eggs a day before then let lose those little ones! This is great fun for whole families of the community.
Non-Seasonal Community Event Ideas
Of course, you do not have to wait for a specific holiday to host. Here are some community event ideas perfect for any day of the year.

5. Comedy Night

Laughter is the best medicine; and it is also one of the best ways to get people to come together and relieve the stress of daily life. You have a lot of options for performers as well. You can hire one comedian for the entire night, offer an improv show, or have an open mic and discover who has the best funny bone in the community!

6. Teach Others about an Activity

One of the best community event ideas is to actually share a hobby or activity to others. For example, if someone is very passionate about Yoga, he or she can share knowledge to others. This can be applied to almost any activity or hobby. Nothing gets people closer than learning together.

7. Big Garage Sale

Garage sales are usually done on a per house basis. So why not get everyone together and host a big garage sale where anyone and everyone can participate? Just need a big open space and a few flyers for all over town and even for adjacent communities.

8. Network Event

You never know what opportunities are right there under your nose. You can host a networking event so that people can share ideas and get to know each other on a professional level.
Dance Event
Remember what it was like in highschool to attend a dance, ball, or prom? Why not do that for the community? It gives everyone a reason to dress up nice for a night and interact with each other on the dance floor.

9. Scavenger Hunt

This can be for kids, adults, or both! Organise a scavenger hunt by placing clues all over town and the winners get something cool! You can get local businesses to join in on the fun too with clues and specific activities being done in their stores.

10. Food or Drink Event

 

Everyone loves food and drinks. So why not use it as your next community event idea? You can have people all over town bring their favourite food and drinks to share to everyone else. Or you can do cook-off competitions of a popular dish in the neighbourhood.

11. Trivia Night

Another great community event idea for those with a competitive spirit; trivia nights are always fun especially if the theme is something that everyone can relate to. Some topic ideas include music, television, and popular culture.

Make sure your next community event is a success with End2End Events in Melbourne! We can help you host the perfect event from start to finish. Contact us today to find out more.

What Every Event Planner Must Understand?

Being an event planner is no easy task. Just ask anyone who has ever planned and executed an event before. There is just so many things happening and you never know what’s going to happen. Will everything go according to plan? Will an unforeseen event change all your plans? Will one small detail derail the entire event?

Blog: Challenges During Corporate Event Planning 

These may sound scary but as an event planner, if you understand these 5 Events Planning Guide, then you have nothing to worry about.

1. Project Management

 

This is probably the most important skill to have when coordinating events. You will become the point of contact of each supplier and all clients involved in the endeavour. You will need to understand which parts go together and basically know the entire event down to the smallest details based on all this information. You should be able to play out the entire event in your head.

It doesn’t matter how you do it, but you have to organise everything. You can choose to use excel sheets or a notebook, the important part is everything is written down and updated to the latest decision. This allows you to be on top of the entire event planning process and any change should go through you. It is also important to keep notes and sheets in a way that you can share them to suppliers and clients so they also understand their role and their parts.

2. Flexibility

No matter how well you’ve planned it, something might go wrong during or right before the event. As the event planner, you should be flexible enough to roll with the punches and fix the problem right then and there.

Ideally you should have back up plans for several things. For example, if the microphone suddenly stops working or the laptop for a presentation broke; these are the things that are easy to anticipate and you can have a backup. But for things that you cannot foresee, you should be level headed enough to think on your feet and make a decision quickly to fix it.

Flexibility also comes into play way before the actual event. Clients may have some unusual requests and it is your job to find a way to deal with it and get it done.

3. A/V Equipment

 

You cannot trust all your A/V equipment will run smoothly. It is important to have a backup plan for them. Moreover, you should know how to operate these things as well in case there is no technician available. It will save you a lot of valuable time if you know how to run even the basic A/V equipment on your own.

4. Back of House Functions

As calm as it may look like on the event floor, the back of the house is in organised chaos mode during events. They scramble to get everything ready on time and to avoid any mistakes.

As an event planner, it is highly advisable that you at least understand the basic concepts of the back of the house from the kitchen to service. Videographers to DJs. You should have a basic understanding of their needs and operations so that you can plan accordingly. At the same time, this will help you in making on the spot adjustments when needed.

5. Communication

Last and certainly not the least, communication plays a key role for any event planning. You should know who to contact for what at all times from the planning stage to actual event. Everything must be communicated to each client and staff so the event goes smoothly. And it is your job to do that.

If you think you need help with running your event, do not hesitate to contact us. Our event planners understand all these qualities and more with years of experience on the field. We at End2End Events can help make sure your event happens without a hitch.

Event Planning Tactics to Increase Your Participant Engagement

Many corporate event planners get so overwhelmed in the organisational details and tend to overlook the more substantial component of any corporate event such as feedback, guest interaction, and participant engagement. Guest participation should be a top priority in ensuring events a success, aren’t they the reason why you went all the trouble of choosing the perfect venue and planning on the details of the event for optimum satisfaction?

1. Open the Event with an Ice Breaker

This is one of the best practices when planning events. You should leave enough time for participants to engage with one another.  Some examples include:

– Storytelling

Break your guests into smaller teams, let them share ideas or experiences they have from the last event that they participated in. This useful crowdsourcing method will also give you enough ideas to run on the next event you will be organising.

– Event highlights

Break your audience into groups and get them to write the best parts of the event. Then ask them to share the list to the entire group, with a reason why they chose or enjoy those parts of the events.

– Networking

Give your attendees a moment to get to know participants. You can either ask them to go around and introduce themselves or put them in pairs and ask to learn and explore the strengths and weaknesses of their new-found colleague

2. Create a Space for Everyone

 It’s typical in meetings or events that a person or a group will stand out. There will be the best minds and the most experienced sharing all their acquired wisdom and tested knowledge. Avoid leaving a fraction of your audience getting entertained and focus on how to make them interact with others.  Split the audience into groups and let them interact with other people. This will limit dominant participants from taking over the events and will allow you to engage non-dominant participants to express their knowledge and expertise.

3. Polls and Q&A 

Believe it or not, some participants attend to mingle and interact with other participants. Limit lengthy presentations and ask speakers to allow the audience to take part by asking questions.

Mental breaks are necessary to ensure that your audience is absorbing every bit of information being shared by speakers and other participants.

Live polls, on the other hand, gives them the feeling of being important. The thing is that participants can lose attention if they are bombarded with lengthy presentations. You must ensure they are actively participating in your event.

4. Use Visual Presentations 

Visual Content is the way to engage. As a rule of thumb, we only have a few seconds to grab somebody’s attention and keep them engaged. Ask speakers of their usual format and suggest the use of visual presentations to make the event more live and interactive. This ensures the event to be a hit and your participants well-engaged and your speakers update their medium.

These are some creative methods and event planning tactics you can apply that don’t require significant time and resources. When planning an event, it is vital to ensure that participants get the most out of everything especially the educational part.  The feeling they get during the event impacts the feedback on the event as useful or successful. Keep participant engagement on top of your list the next time you are planning an event.

At End2End Events, we are always ready for a challenge and exciting tips on how to engage your participants. Contact us today, Specialists in Events Planning in Melbourne at 1300 095 123. You can also stay tuned for more tips by following us on Facebook.

Challenges During Corporate Event Planning and Solutions

Every event professional has their details of events not happening according to plan. Let alone a corporate event, that is at best tasking and entails extensive task planning and enormous patience to get past the problematic details.

Unforeseen events, supplier-related concerns and clashes are just among the constant challenges event planners face in setting up any corporate event.

The solution is always to be prepared to have a plan of action should any incident that can disrupt the event arise.

Overspending / Low Budget Allocation

This is a common occurrence. The thing with overfunded corporate events is the tendency to spend on items or furnishings that will be useless. If you are working on a limited allocation, on the other hand, you end up stretching everything you must come up with the best possible replacement for the must-haves in the corporate event.

Corporate event planners tend to point and shoot when organising events.  The absence of adequate planning and proper allocation will significantly affect the funds and outcome of the event. Best you end up buying every shiny object or worst case, you end up overspending on unneeded party supplies.

Budgeting is essential when organising every corporate event planning.  This will eliminate misallocation of funds and steers you to master strategic planning despite limited funding in the future.

Overlooking Minor Details

Corporate event planners tend to work with their hands full on. There have been stories of event planners going crazy during last minute of preparation because they forgot speakers or the forgot the check if the haze machine was working.

Sometimes, minor details can derail a perfectly planned event if not factored in the planning stage. Every event planner must have a reliable team that can take on the task of ensuring every piece of equipment is working, every supplier is up to date or delivering what they promise, the event place is ready and fully equipped to host the event and the likes.
This is a productive way to ensure things are done without letting them fall into the cracks at the last moment.

Choosing the Right Venue

This is an essential aspect of corporate planning. Venues take time. You must consider space, budget and decoration. The venue will set the theme requirements. It will dictate how you move forward with all other details of your event.

In choosing a venue, you must consider how it will fit in your event. Look for add on services that venue will provide, and thank everything of value that will limit your costs, like projectors, console, lighting and all supplies necessary to your event.

Choosing a venue which adds value to your event will drastically bring down your event planning time and spending.

Weather Challenges

We’ve seen events get destroyed by weather temperaments in a snap. But not even the inclement weather can stop an event, and for the determined planner, anything can be managed with ample preparation and contingency planning.

For rain forecasts on the day of your biggest event, which you planned to do outdoors, you can stock up on ponchos or extra strength umbrellas for distribution. Alternatively, if the temperature is expected to rise because of the flaring summer heat, having stockpiles of juices, water and sunglasses will be highly appreciated by attendees.

This may seem minor but it’s a value-added service speaking on your behalf and marketing your event management skills.

Overcrowded Events

Keep overcrowded events in check and manage attendees with us by providing attendees with enough information. Place signages for proper ingress and egress. Label partitions or offer a map to navigate the venue or provide a guide to make the experience convenient for everyone.

Preparing for these challenges will create a stress-free environment and increase your trustworthiness and ingenuity in planning corporate events.
 
Blog: Tips for Successful Corporate Event Planning

Want to know how you can plan a flawless event with End2End Events? Know more about it here or talk to us.

Keep yourself updated by connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

What can You Learn from First Event to Make Next Event Even Better?

You organised your very first event – that’s great!

Was it the most unforgettable and eventful moment? Obviously, it was! After all, it was your first event.

But let’s not leave behind how the event turned out for you. Of course, you learned a lot from your first event: the difficulties and challenges you faced, those few things that didn’t turn out well for you, and also the things that worked quite well. Every single detail of the event is precious and it is much more crucial to consider all phase of event planning, preparing to execute, and finishing.

The reason is you won’t be settling down to organising only one event. Soon you will be planning for your next one and it is very necessary to keep note of these things before you step into another event planning.

1. Prepare for the worst even if everything is perfect

You might have realised this in your event. No matter how much you get the detailing and prepare for the event, there is a probability that you miss out on things. So, even when everything is right, be prepared for the worst case scenario.

2. Advertise your event everywhere, literally everywhere

There is no hard and fast rule that you should be promoting your event on a particular platform. Go for every platform if you think there is an opportunity for you. 

• Facebook: Facebook is a great platform if you are looking to gain more traffic for your event.
• Instagram: Instagram is for more engagement, take advantage of features like Instagram stories, live videos.
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn means professional network, get quality prospects by promoting here.

Besides social media platforms different event management sites as Eventbrite, Meetup, Eventfinda are great to create a buzz around your event.

3. Repurpose every media from your first event 

Events are a great way to strengthen brand through storytelling, which requires photos and videos to get audiences engaged. Apparently, you can use the photos and videos you had captured at your event. Just share it on a website and all social media platforms using hashtags and tags.

Read: Why Social Media is the Best Platform to Promote Your Event

4. Budget management is crucial – you will learn to invest in higher opportunity

Event planning is not easy and especially when it comes to budget management for the first time, it even gets tougher. Because you do not have real data, there is no source you can rely on to take the decision. So all you can do it to guesswork through the research done. A whole of budget planning and implementation becomes easier once you run an event and have real data.

• You can find which channel to focus and spend more on once you know which drove the maximum revenue.
• You will have an idea of an event venue to choose according to your budget.

5. Proven ways to monetise the gold mine

Did you know it cost you 6-7 times more while acquiring new clients than retaining the existing ones?

If you are putting all your time and effort in attracting new guests even after knowing this fact, then you are just sitting on the gold mine and not monetising it for your advantage. Do you know what can you do the best to reactivate your existing guests? Here are a few ways to keep you going with less time and energy spent:

• You already have the list of past attendees, just segregation of those list from your new lists is required. Then, customise the message to be sent accordingly.
• An effective way to get the attention of the previous attendees is to give them discounts or offers on tickets. This is always a good idea to attract anyone.

These are a few of the things that helped us to make our next event Planning better and successful. We hope this article was helpful to you.

Are you ready to proceed to your second event?

Turn your event into an awesome one without any hassles with End2End events. 

Social Media: The Best Platform to Promote your events

About 79% of Australians use social media today which is 10 times higher than last year.
Social media is trending around the world. From teenagers to oldies and from Facebook to Twitter, users are everywhere.

Are you currently using social media to your advantage?
Social media is undoubtedly a great way to create a buzz regarding your forthcoming event which won’t even cost you any money.

Pointers to consider

Different social media platforms have different purposes and motives. If you are looking for more awareness and traffic, Facebook is the best way to go. However, if your objective is to achieve more responses and discussion, Twitter is useful. So, prior to promoting your event on social media, its important to understand the purpose of each platform and tailor your contents accordingly.

Facebook 

There are over 1.5 billion active users on Facebook. It is the best option if you are considering a larger audience for your event. Furthermore, its an ideal way to target your audiences specifically on a low budget. Below are a few things that you should not miss out while event promotion. Here are some points to consider when promoting your event:

• Firstly, use the “EVENT FEATURE” on Facebook to extend your reach organically.
• Share your events in relevant “GROUPS” and don’t forget to be proactive and initiate conversations.
• Take advantage of the “FACEBOOK LIVE VIDEO” feature to drive more traffic
• “FACEBOOK STORIES” are an invaluable input when it comes to promotion.

Instagrams 

The hype of Instagram usage has increased significantly from 800 million in 2017 to 1 billion in 2018. Due to the high engagement rate, Instagram have become a valuable social media marketing tool for many businesses Sharing pictures and videos of an event - behind the scenes and other random activities of an event drives more engagement and traffic.

• “INSTAGRAM STORIES” are the best way to keep your audiences updated while promoting your event.
• “HASHTAGS” help to reach your posts to a larger audience 

Twitter 

Twitter is a great platform to achieve more interactivity with audiences. Consider the following points while promoting on Twitter.

• “EVENT HASHTAGS” is a powerful way to enhance engagement and to gain attention for your event. Tweets with hashtags acquire double the reach compared to those without hashtags Always use hashtags(#) on Twitter to promote your event plan, 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has now more than 500 million users. Today if you are not using LinkedIn you are missing an opportunity to promote your event.

• ONE-TO-ONE TARGETING is a successful campaign to achieve a higher response and higher conversion.

Do you have an event coming up?
Don’t miss out on new opportunities! Use social media!
Contact End2End Events for any queries – CLICK HERE

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Unforgettable Corporate Event Themes to Inspire You

Corporate events planning is no small feat. Even professional events planner, complaints about the challenges for each event. A successful corporate event success is more on the details weaved together to come to a perfect events theme. Planning out the details of the event is different from setting up the theme of the corporate party to deliver the message.

The event organiser is tasked with the role to propose a theme that will visibly convey the message of the corporate event, may it be for inauguration, annual get-together, a product launch, a gala for benefactors or even a trade show. The very purpose of the theme is to unify the attendees with the objective of the event. It must effectively reflect the purpose of the event and project the brand of the company hosting the event.

Here’s some of the most memorable corporate event themes to consider when hosting your next company event:

Dreamforce Annual Show by Salesforce 

Dreamforce is one of the largest technology conferences in the world today. It is the  annual user conference hosted by Salesforce.com creating memorable  sessions, networking, trainings and keynotes in downtown San Francisco. It gathers together, industry pioneers, thought leaders and thousands of tech savvy professionals. 

This year’s show is set on 19th - 22nd, Nov 2019.

Recreating Rainey Street

page source : https://bit.ly/2H7RbBu

MillerCoors’ Distributors Conference contracted an event agency that recreated the infamous Rainey Street indoors. They staged and housed the feel of the popular strips of renovated houses turned bungalow bars inside the convention space to give attendees the relaxed- ambience of the night life as experience in Austin, TX. 

Dishwasher Water Park

LG’s top of the line Quadwash dishwasher was brought to life in this dishwasher-themed inflatable water park right in the center of New York City in 2017. The South Korean company transformed an entire block to a water attraction to showcase how dishwashing can be more fun. Locals got to beat the summer heat with popsicles while hanging out under cabanas and dryer photobooths.

Swimming in Ink. 

Epson went out of the box and created one of the largest and most exciting brands promises and reveal of all time. Swimming in Ink was staged to showcase the F-series Ecotank printers.  The event was graced by the U.S National Synchronised Swim Team, where they performed in beautiful swim wears designed and integrated with CMYK colors. 

Additional event highlights include attendees being able to print photos from the ecotank printers for free.

Iconic Influencers.

In the attempt to bag the best video social media platform, Instagram, launched its IGTV in 2018 in an empty space in San Francisco that was transformed to 8 separate rooms for different iconic Instagram influencers. The influencers then aired the very first video for their IGTV experience, that was projected to outdo YouTube and Snapchat. The event was made more memorable and purpose-friendly by accommodating attendees in a multi-space venue to share and collect content.

If you are planning your next corporate event, and you are practically overwhelmed just thinking of all the hoops, reach out to our End2End Event Planning team at 1300 095 123, for a free, non-committal consultation.