Tips on How to Find the Perfect Venue for Your Small Event

It’s incredibly easy to put the cart before the horse when it comes to finding an event venue for your small corporate or business to business event. To a great degree the venue you choose will be dependent on the purpose and goals of the event, expectations of the audience and budget for the event.

Free Event Space Isn’t Always the Best Choice

What if you have a free venue for your corporate event? You still need to access the free event space because it may not be suitable for the purpose of the event or meet your attendee’s expectations for the event. When choosing a venue your focus should be on meeting the purpose and goals of the event!
Often small corporate events can be held in the business location to cut costs and for employee convenience, however, this is fine if all the required equipment for the presentation is available and your business location is convenient for any non-employee attendees that you have invited to attend.

If the event is internal than your location is not important, however, if the audience you are targeting is external than the time of the event and convenience of the venue location will affect attendance. Sometimes saving a few dollars on the venue means goals aren’t met and the purpose of the event is not fulfilled.

Preparing to Find Your Perfect Venue

There are a lot of questions you need to consider before you start to find the perfect venue for your small corporate event! You can start with these:

  1. What is the purpose of the event?
  2. What will you need to meet the goals and purpose of the event?
  3. Have you had an event before? What were the results? Did the venue meet all the requirements for the presentation? Did the venue accommodate the event design?
  4. How do you direct attendee’s to the venue and the event location within the venue?
  5. How many attendees? Do they have special needs? What types of attendees? How flexible is their time and when is the most convenient time for them to attend?

Meeting the Purpose and Goals of Your Event

Understanding what the purpose of the event is enables you to establish goals to measure the success of the event and have the equipment and outside services required for the event. Don’t fall into the trap of establishing a simple purpose and goal. For instance on a product launch the obvious purpose is to sell product and the goal is to sell X number of products. In reality there are several steps to selling the product at the event. Each of these steps are goals that you should have a plan to provide the means to meet the goals.

Learning from Past Events

I always like to start a new project by reviewing similar projects I’ve done in the past. Sometimes you may find that I haven’t done a similar project and in that case I’ll look for similarities to past projects in the case of an event I’d be trying to establish similarities between audience and attendee’s. If you have done, or, another employee has done an event before than it is beneficial to access the performance of the previous event space because from there you know what worked and what didn’t and can easily ascertain its ability to deliver a successful event.

Getting Attendees to the Event

Getting attendees to the meeting is the most important goal because the number of people who attend and their frame of mind during the event go a long ways to meeting the purpose of the event! One way to annoy attendees is to provide poor directions to the venue and the location of the event within the venue.
You can avoid this by making sure all promotion and announcement materials include a map to the venue. I like to also include parking and public transportation information in these materials. You should determine how easy it is to find the location in the venue and where the best locations are for your signs directing attendees to the event location.

Know the Audience

Your ability to promote your small corporate or business to business event will go a long way towards determining the venue you will need to arrange for your event. It is important that you schedule your event at a time that is convenient for attendees. If you are scheduling a noon or all day event then you will need to consider if food should be provided etc.

Venue Rental Toronto

There are a large number of venues you can rent in Toronto making it relatively easy to find the perfect venue for your small corporate event or seminar. It is relatively easy to find the perfect venue because you know what you need and can ask the venue the right questions about their services and support. In the next post we’ll cover the venue vetting process.