How to Celebrate a Business Anniversary [Successful Meetings]

Successful Meetings contributor Cassie Brown calls business anniversaries “the vanilla of the events season.” And yet, that doesn’t mean that planning an anniversary celebration is easy. In fact, it’s uniquely challenging, as planners must take great care to craft an event that feels merry, but not frivolous.

The solution, according to Brown, is to approach company celebrations as you would any other event: strategically.

“Realistically, you can’t spend company funds on an event just for the sake of celebration,” Brown says. “The event has to have a strategic business goal.”

The strategic reason for a business celebration might be to motivate the company’s employees, to create an opportunity for bonding with clients or to thank the community. Whatever the strategic objective, the key to success is using the event not as a soapbox or ego-booster, but as a business mechanism.

“People don’t want to attend an event that is all about the company history, which usually means a long, boring speech from the CEO,” Brown says. “Reinforce your brand, and acknowledge the past and future, in innovative ways. Utilize multimedia, staging, even food to make it an event to remember.”

By Mark Payne