The mass meeting. Besides the free doughnuts and justified caffeine addiction, it’s one of the best parts of corporate life. Your company flies you out to some adult playground like Las Vegas or Miami, puts you up in a nice hotel, and gives you a couple free meals and cool take-home toys all on its dime. And what a dime it is.
Despite the sound-prison of fiscal whining we’ve been living in for the last three years, corporations are still dropping plenty of cash on annual mass-meetings, training retreats and other large-scale gatherings. Among the great destinations, gifted speakers and gratuitous meals, companies will need one more thing: an absolute ton of stuff.
From the basics like lanyards and ID badges to hand-picked, high-class performance rewards like watches or electronics, corporations need a boatload of physical gear to pull off a successful large-scale meeting. Should you find yourself in a position providing items for such an event, consider this handy item-by-item breakdown to pick up a few tips before fully stocking your corporate client.
LANYARDS
Whether for holding name tags or carrying key cards and other important items, lanyards are a standard for any large business gathering. When selecting lanyards for purchase, Jackie Francque, sales for Meetings Direct, Verona, Wis., recommended checking their fabric textures to make sure they’re not too rough or coarse, and also keeping the lanyard’s ultimate purpose in mind (a lanyard meant to display a badge would benefit from no-spin or length-adjustment features, while a lanyard for a key card would not, etc.).
● Power Point: Plan for short notice on attendance levels.
“Buying lanyards offshore often requires 60 day delivery times,” said Francque. “That is fine for key rings or IDs for a business, but not for a meeting where a client may not know how many attendees they will have until two or three weeks out.”
