05-21-2020
What to Gift When Corporate Events Turn Into Virtual Events, Cancel, or Postpone
FILED IN: Client & Corporate Gifts, Virtual Events
Posted By: Jamie Kutchman, Founder
While corporate events may be cancelled or postponed due to COVID, gifting for corporate events has certainly not stopped! How, you might ask? With many of these corporate conferences converting over to virtual events, we are now designing the gifts to serve as welcome gifts for a virtual type of event instead. It's been a fun change of pace for us and has certainly helped us stay in business since our more traditional in-person events were all almost immediately removed from our production calendar.
We're excited to share with you a small handful of examples of these reinvented corporate event gift projects we've been working on over the last few weeks. Instead of acting as traditional welcome gifts for attendees to receive upon arrival at a hotel or venue where the event is taking place, recipients instead receive these gifts at their homes instead where they're likely teleworking. (Speaking of teleworking, if you haven't seen our brand new 'Werk From Home' gift box, check it out for employee appreciation, client gifting, or why not even for yourself?)
VIRTUAL EVENT GIFTS
The first thing you'll notice about virtual event gifts is that they tend to have more home-inspired items than items you'd normally see in corporate event gifts. This means items they can use and enjoy while working from home. They have just as many branded items as traditional corporate swag we're accustomed to designing so this way, recipients immediately know who the gift is from and what it's for. The gifts still contain branded collateral as normal. The notecards and/or welcome booklets simply spell out the agenda for the virtual event versus an in-person event...not a huge change there!
For one of our virtual event gift projects, the client wanted something small but still impactful. To keep budget down due to their rather lengthy attendee list, we selected white tuck top boxes and filled them with hand sanitizer, computer-themed socks as a nod to the virtual nature of the event, and Sugarfina vitamin-infused gummies for an immunity boost!
We finished them off of mini-sized gift tags featuring the special logo created especially for their event along with agendas featuring each attendee's first name for a personal touch! We also selected a ribbon color to match their event branding colors to keep everything professional and cohesive.
POSTPONED EVENT GIFTS
For this next project, our client is a forestry business creating fine wood products. We new we wanted the gifts to not only be forestry-inspired but also to reflect their branding colors (and logo!) and also offer items the recipients could enjoy while stuck at home. We included "trees-to-be" for recipients to grow at home and then transplant outdoors, wood coasters engraved with an evergreen motif, forestry-themed socks, woodsy scented candles, and even a gourmet treat!
We finished the gifts off with gift tags featuring their logo. The gift tags were done in burgundy card stock (their primary branding color) and the ribbon matched as well! We created custom notecards with a heartfelt message letting attendees know that they look forward to seeing them at the rescheduled event in 2021. And in times of COVID when everyone is stuck at home, you can't forget the littles. We created a scaled-down version of the gifts for the kids featuring stress-relief play dough, forestry-themed socks in kids sizes, and festive marshmallows.
CANCELLED EVENT GIFTS
For this last project we're sharing, the client wanted home-inspired gift boxes with more emphasis placed on the quality of the items over and above the quantity of items. We selected kraft tuck top boxes to maximize the budget we could allocate to the contents themselves. We included handmade wood snack bowls (for lounging on the couch during quarantine), lemon soap and lotion (for all the frequent hand washing), and a gender neutral candle to keep recipients' homes feeling cozy and inviting (to boost mood).
We finished them off with logo gift tags and on-brand ribbon as well as dried florlas to drive home the home-like feel. We also included a branded custom notecard with a message encouraging recipients to stay home an stay safe as well as sincere regrets for having to cancel.
Having to cancel or postpone corporate events is never fun. But we hope these projects can serve as at least a little inspiration for what is still very much possible with event gifting during these COVID times. If you're looking to outsource your custom corporate event gifts for virtual events or events into the future, we'd love to hear from you and learn more about your gifting goals. Reach out here. We'd love to hear from you!
Images: Marigold & Grey
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