Creating Your Event Planning Budget: Strategies for Successful Team Building Events

Event planning is an intricate process requiring creativity and coordination. Amidst the hustle and bustle, one crucial aspect often determines the achievability and success of your plans: the budget.

Why the team building budget planning process matters:

According to TravelPerk: When organizing team events, respondents care most about staying within budget (62%), planning fun activities (49%), and ensuring as much attendance as possible (37%).

A well-thought-out team building budget leads to a more successful event, and in turn, higher engagement!

Studies by Gallup show: 

• Those with a high level of employee engagement saw a 23% higher level of productivity
• Companies reporting lower engagement experienced an 81% increase in absenteeism
• Businesses with highly engaged employees reported a 10% increase in customer loyalty and engagement

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So what's hindering the event budgeting process? 🧐

When creating an event budget, many of the problem areas come down to these three roadblocks:

1. Not knowing how to create an event budget that makes sense for your organization 🤔
2. Not knowing how to effectively ask for the budget you need and get your event budget approved 😔
3. Not knowing how to manage your budget to meet your corporate event needs 😩

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So how do you create a team building budget that makes sense for your organization? 💭

There are four main pillars that event planners need to consider when it comes to how to come up with your event budget:

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1. What's the right cadence? 🗓

You should have a minimum of one event per quarter in order to maintain a healthy and connected company culture.

The goal should be to offer team building events around once a month, with the idea that your employees attend 6-8 events per year.

However, for many companies that are trying to increase their event participation levels, starting with one event per quarter is a great place to start.

For example:

• Kick-off Q1 with a company-wide event from the DEI Calendar 📅
• Plan a team event in Q2 🙌
• Plan a departmental event in Q3 🤝
• Wrap up the year with a team event in Q4 🎊

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2. What's your company size? 👥

Based on what we see when planning events for our customers, we recommend the following team building event budget example based on your team's size (per person, per year):

• Small companies with under 100 employees: $50-100 per person, per year
• Medium companies with 100-1000 employees: $200-400 per person, per year
• Large companies with 1000+ employees: $400+ per person, per year

💡Remember: This all depends on the macroeconomics and current financial status of the company at the time!

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3. What's the size of your event? 🎉

When it comes to the size of your event, this refers to the financing per guest, rather than the headcount itself. Event sizes fall into these four categories:

• Affordable events: Usually under $25 per person. Examples may include icebreakers and casual, just-for-fun-type events like Confetti’s exclusive in-house games!
• Small events: Typically $25-50 per person. Examples may include DEI, Learning & Development, or Employee Onboarding events.
• Medium events: Can range from $50-$100 per person and happen one to two times a year. Examples may include interactive, hands-on experiences like our Classes with Kits.
• Well-financed events: Tend to be $100+ per person and are meant for special milestone moments and company celebrations.

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4. What important initiatives do you want to accomplish? 📝

For this next step, you'll need to get creative and ask yourself, "What initiatives are important to my team and organization?" Here are some areas to analyze when deciding your event initiatives:

• Industry: For example, if you're in the Wellness Industry, it may be important for your team to celebrate National Relaxation Day with some Health & Wellness team building events!
• Major Milestones: Celebrate the wins! Perhaps you've been working towards a company-wide goal that you'd like to gather your team to recognize.
• Culture: What are the things that make your company culture unique? Perhaps your team takes absurd or lesser-known holidays very seriously and loves to plan team building events around those moments.
• Requests: Survey your team regularly and see what they’re most interested in! 

How to get started 👉 Use our Event Planning Survey Template to understand your initiatives and create an event success!

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Before pitching your event budgets 🛑

Ask yourself these questions first:

1. What kind of financial position is the company in? 📈
2. How much did they spend on events last year? 💰
3. How many events are you proposing to host in the coming financial year? 📅
4. What feeling do you want to curate for the team? 🤗

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Creating your budget strategy and getting it approved 🙌

Whether you have your budget solidified or not, follow these steps:

1. Define the why before the what: Get to the understanding of why you want to do these experiences in the first place.
2. Have conversations with stakeholders and get advice: Get buy-in from the different teams and departments that you're representing. (This is where those Event Planning Surveys really come in handy!)
3. Research & plan your options: Data is your friend! Make sure that you've explored the different events you're interested in and considered what is best for your team's use case. Thoroughly research your options and allow some wiggle room in your budget for unexpected changes (i.e. new employees that have joined since your past events, changing your mind on what initiative this event will be targeting, etc.)
4. Talk to the right people: Figure out who the right person to have these discussions is with and plan a meeting. Is that the CFO? The VP of Finance?
5. Start small & tie it to your business goals: Planning one event or quarterly events is a great place to start while you're gaining traction and momentum. Once you've received enough positive feedback, use those wins to re-negotiate your programming and rework your event budget spreadsheet for events moving forward.
6. Be prepared: Make your budget presentations (and emails) short and sweet. Be ready for tough questions and have your lay of events prioritized by 'necessary' and 'nice to have' so that you're prepared to discuss budget cuts and have your solutions ready when necessary.
7. Be confident: Confidence always sells!
8. Track everything: Once your budget is approved and the event planning process has begun, keep a detailed record of everything, including wins, obstacles and learnings, adjustments within spending, etc!‍
9. Review & re-plan: Next year, when coming up with your yearly team-building strategy, use the past year's data to better plan your next remote or in-person event series!

How to get started 👉 Need an event budget template? Here are 5 Templates for Approaching Budget Discussion with Your Team.

Here's a final budgeting pro-tip! 💡

At the end of the day, you want to tie your budget request back to the strategy:

How will this spending help the company?

• Will it increase retention and decrease churn?
• Is it going to boost employee morale?
• Will it help the organization hit revenue goals?

Here are some examples of goals you may provide to tie back to your budget pitch:

• Improve service levels 🚀
• Increase the sense of belonging within your organization using DEI events
• Use learning and development initiatives to hone soft skills 💼
• Boost connections to improve collaboration and performance across departments...and more! 🧩

To learn more 👉 Visit our blog on the ROI of Team Building to learn more team building statistics!

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Leave the event management to Confetti! 🎊

As you've learned, creating an event budget requires a good deal of research, confidence, and creative thinking.

Skip the venue rental and host your event virtually! Here at Confetti, we've helped customers plan thousands of team building events, all based on their unique budgets and initiative needs. Ready to ride the wave of engaging and interactive virtual team building?

Leave it to the pros! 🎉 Contact [email protected] to start planning an event within your unique budget today!

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