It’s that time of year again.

Budgets are being built. 2027 SKOs are creeping onto calendars. Procurement teams are gearing up. And RFPs are starting to land.

Which means somewhere, right now, someone is writing: “We need a venue for 800 people.”

Useful information. But it isn’t a brief.

Neither is “we need an SKO in February”, “we did Barcelona last year” or “we have £1 million to spend.”

They’re parameters.

Before the venue search, destination shortlist or production brief, there’s a much more important question:

What are we actually trying to achieve?

What does success look like?

An SKO, conference or packed ballroom is only the starting point. The real value lies in what happens because of it.

Perhaps it’s changing behaviour, improving sales performance, building belief in a new strategy, retaining your best people, rewarding success, connecting teams or accelerating pipeline.

Whatever the ambition, being clear about it from the outset helps shape an event that delivers far more than a great day in the room.

Budget for the outcome, not the shopping list

Budgeting season inevitably brings spreadsheets.

Venue. Production. F&B. Travel. Accommodation. Entertainment.

But how much you spend on each should depend on what you’re trying to achieve.

If your SKO is primarily about enablement, should more money go into learning and content?

If it’s about reconnecting a dispersed workforce, are you investing enough in the moments where people actually connect?

If it’s reward and recognition, does the experience feel like a reward?

There isn’t one correct way to spend an event budget.

And a £1 million event isn’t successful simply because it came in at £995,000.

Cost and value are of course not the same thing.

Shake things up a bit

Annual events have a habit of inheriting things.

Three days because it was three days last year. Six breakouts because there were six breakouts last year. An hour-long leadership keynote because that’s what we’ve always done. A gala dinner because… well, obviously there has to be a gala dinner.

Maybe there does.

But RFP season should be the moment to challenge it.

If you were creating this event for the very first time, would you still build it this way?

And remember who it’s actually for

Leadership may own the budget and procurement may run the RFP, but it’s the attendee experience that ultimately shapes whether an event succeeds.

People are giving you their time and attention, so it’s worth considering what you want them to think, feel or do differently afterwards. Attendance tells you who was in the room. The more valuable question is what changed because they were there.

Once the outcome is clear, the audience is understood and success has been agreed, the design decisions become much easier. Venue, destination, agenda, production and experience can all work together with greater purpose.

It also gives agencies the opportunity to do their best work. Share a list of rooms, dates and delegate numbers and you may receive several variations of a similar event. Share the business challenge behind it, and the possibilities become much more interesting.

So, as RFP season begins and 2027 planning gets underway, perhaps the first question isn’t simply:

“Where should we hold it?”

But:

“What momentum do we want it to create?”