Let’s be honest: Planning the company holiday party gets a bad rap.
Sure, preventing intoxicated coworkers from knocking over the spiced punch bowl is thankless work, but the nuts and bolts of party planning is not as painful as you might think.
Splash is full of speedy fixes to common company holiday party planning dilemmas. Here are the top five headaches that pop up along the way, and how to remedy them:
Luckily, Splash has 20 beautiful pre-designed event pages that look good right out of the box. Even the most design-challenged person can create an event page & invite that will make a discerning designer swoon. Just register for an account, choose a theme you like, upload a photo from our gallery or find one on a royalty-free site like ZoomyApp or Unsplash, input the crucial details, and you're good to go.
Without a good headcount estimate, you won't know how much food/booze to budget for. Here's an easy way to get employees to confirm their attendance weeks in advance: Load up your employee invite list into Splash, email a save-the-date, and watch the RSVPs roll in. Responses are automatically saved; no need to have an intern manually enter them into a spreadsheet. Now you know whether to plan for 50 guests or 100 guests.
How do I get there? Is the company paying for Ubers? Can I bring a +1? Will there be food? Oy. Don't spend half your day answering duplicate emails. Add an FAQ section to your holiday Splash, and include all the nitty-gritty details on one mobile-friendly event page. Then, just send the event page URL in response to every Slack and Gchat message you get. Easy-peasy.
A “nice” camera isn’t the deciding factor of whether or not you have party pics. Crowd-sourcing photographs is an easy fix. (Pro tip: they look KILLER after an event, too.) You can easily pull in a stream of photos with your hashtag—it’s seamless and uber social—but in case your employees feel weird posting work photos on Instagram, you can also upload photos individually.
Try making it interactive: Launch a photo contest challenge during your holiday party and have guests email in their submissions to an appointed curator. Then upload them to your post-event page, change the RSVP button and form to “VOTE” language, and crown a winner.
As a safeguard, lock in a few (notably) fun co-workers to help ease the fear. Make it even more interesting by adding in a witty conversation-starter like: "What's your claim to fame?" or “What would you title your own memoir?” Then, curate the answers with the author’s respective headshots on your holiday party page for employees to spot as they RSVP. The speaker’s block is a perfect hack for this kind of display. Check it out:
Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.
