After 5 EventsDecide the venue constraints before the programme
Most anniversary events inherit a venue: the ministry's own hall, the historic building the agency opened in, a city-owned conference centre. That is fine, but walk it early. Measure the ceiling height at the point where the screen will hang, find where power enters the room, and ask how a crew gets equipment from the street to the stage. A venue manager will tell you the room holds two hundred; they will not tell you the projector is mounted in a fixed cage and cannot be swapped, or that rigging anything from the ceiling requires a licensed structural engineer to sign off three weeks ahead.
If the room has a permanently installed AV system, get the technical rider: model numbers, connection types, who operates it. Systems in public buildings are often a decade old and were specced for presentations, not for a film screening or a live feed to an overflow room. The earlier you know that, the earlier you can budget for what replaces it.
Assume bilingual delivery and build from that
If your staff work in two languages, the event will be bilingual — and that affects almost every production decision. Speeches need a second microphone or simultaneous interpretation, which means booth space, headset distribution, and a technician who speaks both languages and can ride the levels when a speaker switches mid-sentence. Screens need slide decks in two languages, either alternating or side by side, and that changes the safe text size.
The timeline film, the congratulations video from a partner organisation, the opener: all of it needs subtitles or voiceover, and someone has to watch it for timing before the event. Build an extra week into the content schedule just for that.
Make the presentation work loadbearing, not decorative
An anniversary is the one event where the content on screen is the content of the event. Founders speaking over archive photographs, a three-minute history film, a partner giving a presentation with a sixty-slide deck: all of that has to be visible, audible and timed. The screen size follows from the back row, not from what looks balanced on stage. If the furthest seat is eighteen metres away and the slide has three columns of numbers, calculate the text height needed for legibility and work backward to screen dimensions.
Rehearsal is not optional. The founder who has spoken at a hundred events has never spoken at this one, with a lapel mic, a confidence monitor at their feet, and a slide deck they did not build. Walk through it the afternoon before, with the real equipment, in the real room. The five minutes that costs you will save the speech.
Itemise everything, because the line between decor and equipment is procurement
Public money comes with thresholds. Above a certain sum you go to tender; below it you can negotiate directly. But what counts toward that sum is not always obvious, and the safe answer is: everything. The LED screen is obviously equipment, but so is the structure it hangs from, the operator who runs it, and the van that delivered it. The centrepieces might be decor, or they might be a supplier contract that should have been tendered separately.
Ask for an itemised offer: not one price for "production," but line costs for screen rental, operator day rate, audio package, lighting rig, load-in crew, and everything else. That makes it auditable, and it also shows what you are paying for. Some agencies quote low on the day rate and high on equipment they subcontract; others own the gear and charge for the labour. Both can be correct, but only one of them is visible when the offer is itemised.
Ask who will actually be on site
There are two kinds of event company. One takes your brief, adds a margin, and forwards it to the lighting subcontractor, the AV subcontractor, the staffing agency. They coordinate, they do not do. The other sends their own crew: the person who quoted the audio is the person who tunes the room, and when something stops working at seven in the evening they do not wait on a phone call.
You can ask this directly: who will be on site, and are they your employees or a subcontractor's? For an anniversary — where a former minister is speaking, a journalist might attend, and a single failed cue becomes the story — you want the people in the room to be the people who built the plan.
Photograph and film for the next decade
An anniversary happens once. The photographs will appear in the agency's annual reports, intranet banners, and anniversary books for the next ten years, so the brief to the photographer is not "capture the event" but "produce the archive." That means shot lists: the executive board together, the original team if they attend, the minister at the lectern, the timeline screen readable in frame, the room full and correctly exposed.
If video is being cut for the website or for social, give the editor a list of the must-have moments before the event, and make sure the camera operator knows when they happen. The founder's speech is announced; the three-minute film starts without one. Miss it and it is gone.
What to settle before calling anyone
You now face a decision: run this event with in-house coordination and separately contracted suppliers, or bring in a production team that quotes, builds and operates as one unit. The first is more work for you and requires you to be the layer that connects the screen supplier to the audio supplier to the venue. The second costs more in absolute terms and less in your time, and the trade is whether your time is the budget you have.
Before you call anyone: confirm your venue and walk it with a tape measure and a camera. List every moment that will appear on screen and how long it runs. Decide whether bilingual means interpretation, subtitles, or both. Work out your procurement threshold and whether this event sits above or below it. Then describe what the event must accomplish, and let the people who build rooms tell you how the room accomplishes that.
This guide was written by the crew at After 5 Events — the people who hang the screen, run the desk and stay until the last case is packed.