Corporate Event Venue Walk Report: 7 Items to Document

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A site visit where everyone walks into the ballroom, agrees it looks great and walks out has told you almost nothing. The room looks great empty, lit for a tour, in the middle of the afternoon, with nobody in it. Your event is none of those things.

This corporate event venue walk report covers what we look at, and what we would write afterwards.

Stand at the back, not the front

Every site visit happens from the front of the room, which is where the problems are invisible. The people who have a bad time at a corporate event are at the back, at the far corners, and behind a pillar.

So the walk starts at the worst seat in the room. Can you hear a normal speaking voice from the lectern. Can you see the screen. Is there a service door behind you that will open forty times during dinner. Is that corner ten degrees colder.

The list we work through

• Ceiling height and surfaces. Hard surfaces and high ceilings mean long reverberation, which destroys speech intelligibility before it affects music.
• Pillars and sightlines. Count the seats with an obstructed view of the stage and decide whether those tables get sold or not.
• Power. Where are the outlets, what circuits are they on, and is there anything else on the same circuit. Historic and unconventional venues are where this bites.
• Load in path. Door width, elevator, distance from the dock, stairs, and whether the path goes through a public area during service.
• Ceiling and rigging points, if anything needs to hang.
• Room controls: who holds the lighting, who holds the house audio, and can that person be reached during the event.
• Adjacent rooms. What is happening next door, and is there an air wall that leaks sound in both directions.
• Service doors and kitchen noise, and where they are relative to the stage.
• Temperature and airflow, which nobody checks and everybody complains about.
• Wifi and cellular signal, particularly in basements and convention halls.
• The actual location of restrooms and coat check, because a long walk changes how much of the room stays.

Ask when the room was last used and for what

Venue staff will tell you what a room is good for if asked directly, and they will tell you what went wrong last time if asked kindly. That conversation is worth more than the floor plan.

Photograph everything, including the boring parts

Photograph from the worst seat, the load in path, the electrical panels, the ceiling, the service doors and the corners. Photograph anything that is already damaged, because that becomes a question afterwards.

And photograph the room from the doorway, because that image is what an attendee sees when they arrive and it is the one you will use when deciding what the entrance experience should be.

What the report should say

Not a description of the room. A list of constraints and decisions.

• Sound: the reverberation reality and where speakers have to go, with the coverage problem named.
• Power: what is available and what has to be brought in.
• Load in: the window required and any restriction, such as no load in during meal service.
• Sightlines: which seats are compromised and what to do about them.
• Schedule constraints: curfews, noise limits, union or labor rules, when the room becomes available.
• Open questions with a named person at the venue to answer each one.

Do it with the vendors, not before them

A site visit where the planner goes alone and reports back is a site visit where the audio questions did not get asked. Bring whoever is handling sound and whoever owns the run of show, or at minimum send them the photographs and the technical sheet before they quote.

We ask for a walk or the specifications before committing to a setup, because a room that looks small can behave like a much larger one and finding that out at 3pm on the day is not a plan.

Proof from the room: see how we opened the FTF News Technology Innovation Awards.

Questions we get

Can we do this virtually

Partly. Photographs, a floor plan and the venue technical sheet cover most of it. What a video walk cannot give you is how the room sounds, which is the thing that matters most.

When should the walk happen

Before the contract if you can, because the walk sometimes changes which room you want. Otherwise at least 30 days out, so there is time to solve what it finds.

Will you come to ours

For events in our corridor, yes. For events further out we work from photographs, the technical sheet and a call with the venue, and we walk the room on the arrival day.

Next step

Send us the venue name, the room and whatever documentation you have. We will send back the questions to ask before you sign.