Live corporate entertainment options for meetings and conventions
The warm climate and the endless choice of tourist attractions make Orlando in Florida an ideal place for conventions, conferences and fairs. In fact, Orlando hosts literally hundreds of national and international meetings every day of the year. Since the attention of the participants will often be drawn away from the convention to the theme parks and nightlife in Orlando, it is important to provide additional live entertainment and incentives for activity during the event. Whether the event is at the Orange County Convention Center or Walt Disney World, this article gives helpful tips on how to rent live entertainment for your Orlando meeting.
The first step is to decide what Conventual activities you would like to have live entertainment. Be creative in planning, because adding some unexpected fun throughout the convention will help keep participants energetic and positive. Everyone expects a show after the gala dinner, but what about the morning session to wake up all or during a break in one of the long afternoon meetings. Thinking outside the box with entertainment will help to make the Convention an event that stands out from the crowd.
Once you know where you want to spend time on entertainment, you can start focusing on what kind of entertainment you want. Nowadays, the possibilities of corporate entertainment are practically unlimited. You can choose to entertain your guests with costume stilt walkers, mages, comedians, hypnotists, fire-eaters, bands, vocalists, fortune-tellers or acrobats. If your event has a theme, you can try to match it to that theme. The Magic Customer Service theme fits into a magical show. A Mardi Gras event can benefit for fortune-tellers, jugglers and other street animators. If you are opening a fun session, you may want to consider a comedian or comedy actor who could give a false motivational speech to make everyone laugh. Don’t be afraid to break with tradition. If you always have a standing comedian at dinner, try a comedy hypnotist or a corporate game show to give your guests something fresh and new.
When you narrow your choice down to one or two types of acts, you must start looking for specific animators. You can make your search easier by first deciding on the criteria for what you want in your entertainment. Do you want to have a national or local law? Does the act have to be clean or a little PG-13 or R rated material suitable for your group? Do you want the programme to be interactive and involve the public? How long does the performance last? (Planning tip: Most of the shows after dinner last between 45-60 minutes and you risk the audience being restless). Does the performer have to work with any special restrictions (whether the show is outside, whether the space is limited, etc.)? All these items in your list should be used to display potential entertainment choices.
You can start searching for animators online. There is no shortage of animators with websites. If you find an entertainer’s website of interest to you, contact the entertainer to find out what his fees, availability and whether he is able to meet your criteria. If they are not on the website, you should ask for references or referral letters from former clients. If the performer is a real corporate animator, he has already done for a client in the same industry as your company. Also make sure that you submit special requests or potentially exceptional situations regarding your event with the Reservation Manager before signing any contracts. On the other hand, it is also important to ask what the animator will need to deliver to the show. This will allow you to plan your budget for any audiovisual or staging needs and avoid unpleasant last-minute surprises.
When you’re looking online for an entertainer, watch out for websites catalogues such as the Gigmasters, who list the thousands of entertainers who have paid for advertising on the site. Many of these websites will take your contact details and send them to dozens of their animators, and you will be a firewall with emails and calls from animators whom you are not even interested in.
Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando Resorts both live entertainment departments that organize entertainment for amusement parks, as well as for conventions taking place on the premises of the resort. If you are organizing a party in a hotel or a place where one of these theme parks is located, you can ask about the available entertainment options.the positive side of a theme park entertainment booking is that it allows you to bring a bit of theme park magic to the convention guests.