How to organize the perfect office holiday party?

The holiday period is coming up and you have decided to organize your office holiday party? This is the right article for you then! Yup, we’ve got you covered: Find the ideal place, invite your guests, offer delicious food, and animate your even.

Learn now with Eventdrive, the all-in-one management platform, how to simplify the organization of your events, but mostly how to organize the highly-anticipated company party of the year. You will learn everything from A to Z! 

Find the ideal place

One thing for sure, if you want to provide an unforgettable moment, you will need an original place! Because the place where you will run your event is essential for creating an amazing experience… Especially if you want to make it emotional. Got it? So don’t be afraid and think big!

Finding an atypical place is not so easy. We advise you to check out specialists. They are used to handling these kind of requests and have access to private places, only them can know about.
At Eventdrive, we love to work with Privateaser. By the way, we found a crazy karaoke venue for our last year office holiday party: the BAM Parmentier. Team members remember this moment like if it was yesterday, believe me 🙂

What matters the most is to choose a place that will look alike your company spirit, while fitting the constraints:

Type of events: plenary, dinner, team building, parties…
Guests number: the choice will be different if it concerns a startup with 15 employees, or if it is for a major group with 500+ collaborators.
The emotion you want to give: Do you want to impress your guests or just make sure to be in a favorable climate to have fun? You are holding all the cards! The location: ill you have a shuttle service available? Otherwise, choose a central place where your guests will easily go back home safe and sound after a few drinks.

If you intend to pass a message to the whole crowd, you better choose a restaurant or a spacious room to catch their attention. You want to make an amazing party? Remember that we had selected 10 atypical places that would perfectly match with your event.

If your watchword is conviviality, you can propose entertaining activities that allow to create and nurture relationships. Some people ask for setting-upa foosball, a pool table , or even a ping-pong table at the event location. For more entertainments and memories, we advise you to get a photobooth! The perfect tool to capture this convivial moment.

Open your calendar!

To book the place for your end of the year, you shall start caring about it in advance for an early booking. September is the perfect month to do it, but October will work good as well 🙂

Nevertheless, you will need to choose a date, and this is a real headache.

Organizing an event during the week-end is a very bad idea: These two days are sacred for your collaborators and probably for you too. This is one of the rare time where you really rest and and enjoy time with your families. So, you should opt for an evening in the week… Thursday is actually ideal. Your guests will be available and will have time to recover during the week-end then,. You definitely should avoid days at the beginning of the week though!

To gather the most guests possible

This is one metric that superiors love! However, the bottom line always needs a bit of context. It is a lot more long term thinking process, as it is something that takes times to develop. After event follow-ups are for instance necessary to get better precise statistics.

A very important metric for your event but it is very vague to most. The calculation is as follows:

(the event’s total event figure — event costs / event cost)

However, this calculation needs to be justified and explained, as depending on the event objective the ROI can be determined with other methods.  Giving context to this number is extremely important.

This metric can be an important KPI for the event as it allows you to know what you got out of it. In order to realize this, a good budgeting tool will ensure your best asset to get as much precise information as possible. There are great ones available, especially in integrated solutions like Eventdrive.

The more the merrier

If you want to create new links with your collaborators and/or your employees, do not hesitate to invite the most guests possible. Offer the possibility to your guests to bring their spouse, or eventually their children (dogs?), establish solid links, and create new relationships.

Offer quality food

Here is a very important point that should not be missed! If your propose delicious food to these dears epicureans (yes, everyone is keen on food), people will still talk about your event in July!

Sweet or salty? What can you propose as starters? What drinks? Meat, fish or vegetables? And for dessert…? Anyway, these questions require answers. And to be sure to avoid mistakes, what better way to ask for a caterer specialized in corporate event!

Within Eventdrive, we fell in love with monbanquet.fr. The first reason is because they simplify your life – just like us. But also because they completely transform your experience of traditional caterer as well.
Available only in Lyon and Paris – for the moment -, their dream team is attentive to your needs and they only select local artisans, with a traditional craftsmanship. Quantity and quality are priorities for monbanquet.fr!

Your dedicated project manager takes also care about the logistic, from the delivery to the buffet’s decoration. You can rest and approach your party in a serein way. Tested and approved by Google, BlaBlaCar, L’Oréal ad Facebook!

Finally, keep in mind the objective of your office holiday party! If conviviality is your priority, a buffet where your need to stand up is the best option to engage people chatting. However, if you are looking for something sophisticated, a sitting option seems more refined. Think also about people eating special food and try to satisfy everyone. It will be appreciated.

Put the volume on!

Do you know this feeling when you start to feel drowsy on your chair because the music played are  boring? This is the feeling you need to avoid. So try to catch guests attention to make them enjoy this holiday party. This is why a good DJ and a good playlist is essential!

We have to admit that the songs choice is particularly subjective. To satisfy the most people possible, we advise you Tracktl. Our teams have collaborated with them, and we have loved the concept of creating interactive and collaborative playlists. This match perfectly with corporate events.

Tracktl will enable you to engage with your participants to:

• make them stay
• entertain them thanks to the power of music and digital
• make an unforgettable holiday party
  

Enjoy!

Find the place to be: done.

Send invitations: done.

Choose the perfect caterer: done.

Collaborative event: done.

No stress anymore: done.

Everything is ready, so now it’s time to relax and enjoy! Office holiday parties are great opportunities to talk with you colleagues and reinforce links in another context. You have the right to enjoy as much as others 🙂

Last but not least, to finalize your holiday party that is going to be craaaaazy, try to prepare a satisfaction survey. Thus, you could know what participants prefered the most and the least. Sounds perfect to harvest new ideas and boost your next events. And now, play on!