How to Budget for Company Events in 2025: A Practical Guide
How to Budget for Company Events in 2025: A Practical Guide
BoomPop Team · 9/17/2024
As you wind down 2024 and look ahead to 2025, you may be tasked with creating a budget for your 2025 event program. Event budgeting can be difficult, especially since event programs vary each year. But with proper planning and consideration, creating an accurate events budget is possible.
In this article, you’ll find a framework you can use to approach event budgeting for an entire event program. (If you’re still creating your event program, check out this week's post on Event Cadence to help you with planning.)
Establish event purpose
We can not stress enough the importance of an event's purpose. Establish the purpose of each event you plan on hosting before you start budgeting. For example, do your events tie back to company goals and priorities? Do they add to your culture? The event purpose should help you determine the scope which is proportional to the budget.
2. Determine event types
Once you've established the purpose of each event, you can determine the type of event you’d like to budget for. Here are some common event types (not exhaustive).
Offsites
Happy Hours
Team Meetups
Team Building
Training workshops
Holiday parties
Anniversary Celebrations
Kick Offs
Networking/customer facing events
Hack-a-thons
Product Launches
The event type will also determine the scope and the budget.
3. Vendor costs
Now that you know the types of event you’ll be planning for throughout the year, you’ll want to start breaking down the costs of your vendors for each event. To get a clear picture of how much you will need to budget, break down costs into these key vendors:
Venue/hotel: Will it be in-house, rented, or outdoors? Venue costs typically take a significant portion of the budget.
Catering/Entertainment: What’s the scale of food and drink offerings you’ll provide? Consider everything from full-course meals to simple snacks.
Swag/gifts: This includes branded swag, printed materials, or digital handouts for attendees, presents for holiday parties etc.
Technology: Will you need audio-visual equipment, live-streaming capabilities, or other technical services?
Also, don’t forget to include taxes, fees, and gratuity for each vendor. This will help you establish a more accurate budget.
4. Additional considerations: guests, location, duration, and more
Here are some other factors to consider when planning and budgeting for your events:
Event size: Larger events with more attendees will naturally have higher costs, particularly for venues and catering and maybe even IT support.
Location: Do your attendees need to travel? Are you covering travel costs?
Duration: A multi-day retreat will require more resources than a one-day event.
Production Complexity: High-tech elements like live streaming, elaborate lighting, and multimedia presentations will push the budget up (reach out to get quotes in order to help you
Example: All event types are different; however, we have seen from past surveys that offsites cost about $2k-$3k per person (depending on length of stay).
5. Prepare for the unexpected
Expect the unexpected. There are always unexpected costs that pop up during events.This is normal. So the best thing you can do is build a buffer of about 10% into your budget for each event.
This will give you peace of mind as you are planning. It is always better to over-budget and come under than the opposite.
6. Add it up
Once you have general costs (in which we encourage you to round up within each category) begin to put together a total events budget that is realistic. This is your time to get creative and move event types around.
You can categorize it by a quarterly budget if it helps make the task of planning easier. This helps as there may be some quarters that require more spend than others, like the end of the year which consists of more holiday gatherings and reasons to get the team together.
Dive in Deeper
Need more support on budgeting for an event that is part of a larger ecosystem of events? Check out our Budgeting for Offsites Ebook. An offsite is just several events in one, which means we have copious amounts of information for you to help guide the way you think about setting up your budget for the bigger picture, your events program.
We’re Here to Help
Planning an event shouldn't be stressful. Our team of experts can handle everything from venue sourcing to activity coordination, allowing you to focus on fostering connections with your team. Contact us today for a free consultation
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