Become A Multi-Purpose Venue

Clients booking at your venue for every event of the year.

Wouldn't it be great?

For any single business, there can be a lot of social events throughout the year.

After work drinks
The Christmas party
Company awards night
End of financial year party
Halloween

 
There can also be a number of personal events for members of the same company celebrated too!

Birthdays
Leaving parties
Baby showers
Engagements
Family meet ups
Welcome home parties
....to name a few!

During my time as an event manager (venue based), we had clients with many events to celebrate, but quite often wanting a different feel for every event. They sometimes felt they had to chop and change venues to achieve this.

Interestingly enough, using entertainers can be a great way to transform the same space to suit a range of different event requirements - meaning more regular clients for you as a venue, and a place your clients can trust (and sometimes even rack up loyalty points at) = win/win!

In this blog, you’ll learn about how to use entertainment to make your venue one that clients want to use for every event of the calendar year.

Let’s talk about a few reasons why using the same venue for all their events can benefit a customer. There’s loyalty points, they know how to get there, they know the parking situation. They know what prices to expect, an idea of the menu, and whether the venue is suited to their needs i.e: is it kid friendly, does it have a smoking area, is there good access to public transport. They know the opening hours, the drink selection, and if the venue has the capacity to accommodate their dietary requirements.

It makes sense for the same venue to be used for multiple events for all of these reasons. The kicker however, is the want for “something different”, or “to change it up”.

Food and beverage changes can be a good way for venues to offer a different experience for a client’s different events. You may already have a special cocktail list, or a canape menu for more formal events, or even some decorations stashed, well, wherever you can find space (often the storage situation at venues can be dire!!).

But, to be honest when you talk about these different events, the change that people are really looking for is a change in the vibe. They want to feel a different way at these different events – and this goes way beyond an umbrella in a drink, or flowers on the food.

And this is where entertainment becomes a priceless tool.

Let’s look at an example.

Imagine sitting having a beer at your local and listening to a guitar/singer acoustic duo during the day. Now, think about the same setting, except in the evening with a live covers band of 6 people playing tracks everyone can sing to. They’re both music. You’re still sitting drinking a beer. You’re still at your local. But you would feel completely different.

You’re again at your local, but this time for a dress up party for Halloween with some friends. In the corner there’s a makeup artist doing small pieces of art on people. She’s painting fake cuts, cobwebs, skulls, all sorts - the perfect addition to your costume. Later on that year, you’re in for the company awards night with an Oscars theme, but this time there are living statues fully painted in gold, moving from pose to pose on stage. How cool? Again – same venue, same discipline (i.e: using makeup), completely different vibe created in the same space.

So let’s go through a few of the events in the list above, and see what entertainment would suit the vibe for each.

For after work drinks, go for an acoustic duo as opposed to a Spotify playlist.

For the Christmas party, I’d recommend “sit and watch” entertainment – something that makes everyone stop and look. This would be a dance performance, a circus act or a singer.

For the company awards night, that's when you want to have someone on the door. A performer dressed up x 100 to the theme to make sure guests are warmly welcomed, shown where to sit and to hand them their first drink. Awards nights are the time to make everyone feel really, really appreciated, and a great welcome is a perfect way to do just that (especially if not everyone is going to win an award!!).

Lastly Halloween, an amazing opportunity to use performers to transform a space. Halloween is one of those times where people feel a little bit wild and you want your vibe to match that. Have some roving actors in full prosthetic makeup, performers walking around on stilts, aerial performers hanging from the ceiling!

To summarise - if you're wanting people to use your place time and time again for multiple different events, make it a different experience for them each time using entertainers.

If you’re an event manager, are venue based or have a company who runs lots of annual events and you'd like to know how to mix it up, Event Flair would love to help. Contact us here – we’d love to hear what you’re planning and take it up a level!