Planning an offsite event can be a daunting task with countless details to manage and coordinate. In this blog, we’ll take you through a step-by-step guide on how the Epoch team organized their annual company offsite in Calgary – using Epoch!
To begin setting up the offsite event, we used the new generative AI suggestions to generate the event description. After selecting from a variety of writing styles (formal, energetic, elevated) and the length of description (short, medium, long), it outputted an engaging suggested description for our offsite event.
To plan the schedule the itinerary for the offsite, we used the Epoch offsite template.
Since our offsite included various workshops, team-building activities, and scheduled meal times, we scheduled it as a multi-session event. This way, we could outline the details, location, and timing of the individual activities that would be taking place.
Category tags are used to group similar events so employees can easily search for what they are interested in. For this offsite, we categorized it as a company-wide event.
To give our event a personalized touch, we customized the event page with a cover photo representing Calgary’s landscape. 🖼️
Epoch allows for capacity management by putting a cap on the number of guests able to register. We opted to allow for unlimited registrations.
This event was set to public, rather than private and invite-only, so it is visible and open to everyone.
Through Epoch, we created a dedicated Slack channel, "#calgary2024," for those attending the offsite. This helped in fostering pre-event engagement and provided a centralized place for discussions and updates.
Once guests register for the offsite, they see pre-event questions on the event page and Slack. Epoch provides the option to write event questions from scratch or use a pre-made template. Additionally, question responses can be long answers, multiple choice, single choice, or a linear scale.
We set three questions:
Epoch allows us to send the attending guests a feedback form via email and Slack. We opted to send a feedback form to our registered guests 10 minutes before before the offsite ended and made the responses anonymous to encourage honest feedback.
For our 3 feedback questions, we customized a pre-made template:
To collect feedback at any time anonymously, we used the content feature. We collected anonymous responses before the event to have a Q&A with Epoch’s co-founders: What questions do you have for Jade and Keith?
Epoch seamlessly integrates with Google Calendar and allows calendar events to be created for each session. As the event organizer, the Google Calendar event can be updated, with the changes immediately reflected on Epoch. Additionally, when creating an event, there is an option for guests to be invited to the calendar event when guests are invited or only after guests RSVP to reduce notification fatigue.
Epoch can send customized pre-event Slack and email messages to attendees. These reminders can include a GIPHY to make it fun and attention-grabbing for attendees.
For the offsite, we opted to send two reminders to the guests:
These reminder messages can be sent to specific categories of people. For the offsite, it was sent to all of the invited guests.
Epoch can help gather employees for events by reaching your team where they are, on Slack, email, or Google Calendar. You can easily promote events with the click of a button, and collect feedback after the event is over.
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