How to Brief a Christmas Party Agency (The Template EAs Actually Need)

• A good brief is one page, eight sections, sent in a Google Doc or PDF.
• Share the budget envelope. Withholding it costs you time, not money.
• Be specific on objectives and audience. Be deliberately open on creative direction.
• Define the agency’s scope clearly: full delivery, part-scope, or venue-search only.
• State your decision process: who responds, how, by when, and who decides.
• Expect a follow-up call from every serious agency. Schedule it in advance.

The brief most EAs send is two sentences in an email. “We’re planning our Christmas party for around 300 people. Budget probably similar to last year. Could you send us a proposal?”

Three things happen.

Each agency interprets the gap in the brief differently. One assumes high budget, premium venue, full production. One assumes mid-market, venue package, lighter creative. One assumes you want a concept-led pitch and writes you a theme rather than a quote.

The proposals come back at different price points, in different formats, with different scopes. You have to translate them into something you can compare, which takes you a week.

The follow-up calls drag on. Each agency wants the information you should have given them up front. Your inbox fills with the same five questions in slightly different phrasing.

A structured brief solves all three. It does not need to be long. It needs to be clear.

Eight sections, in this order:

1. Objectives. What this event is for, in two or three sentences.
2. Audience. Headcount, plus-ones, departments, seniority mix, dietary and accessibility data.
3. Dates and venue direction. Locked date or window. Location radius.
4. Budget envelope. The working range, not a final figure.
5. Format direction. What you broadly want; what you do not want.
6. Must-haves and must-not-haves. The handful of details that are non-negotiable on either side.
7. Scope of agency role. What you want the agency to own.
8. Decision process. Who responds, how, by when, and who decides.

This sits in a one-page Google Doc or PDF. It can run to a second page if your audience composition is complex. It should never be longer than two.

This is the section EAs most often skip. Three lines on what this event is for. Not “to thank the team”. That’s the default for every Christmas party. Specific.

Examples that work:

“This year’s event is the first Christmas party since the merger. The audience includes 220 colleagues from the original team and 90 from the acquired team, most of whom have never met. The event needs to do real work on internal cohesion.”

“We have moved to hybrid working. The Christmas party is the only moment of the year all 480 colleagues are in the same room. The event needs to feel like a meaningful moment of collective presence.”

“We are a high-growth scale-up that has just announced a Series C. The Christmas party is the first chance to set the tone for the next phase of the business.”

What to leave out: aspirational marketing language. “An unforgettable night of magic” is not an objective. It is a vibe. Agencies will read the rest of the brief and tell you whether they think they can deliver magic. Your job is to tell them what the event is for.

The boring bits are not boring. They are what every agency uses to price.

Headcount with a real tolerance. “Approximately 300” is not a working number. “320 confirmed colleagues plus an expected 80 to 110 plus-ones, working assumption of 400 for venue capacity” is.

Audience composition. Department mix. Seniority mix. Age range if relevant. Any specific groups that need particular consideration (international colleagues flying in, accessibility requirements, dietary distribution).

Locked date or window. “Friday 12 December” is the cleanest. “First two Fridays in December” is workable. “Sometime in December” is not.

Location radius. Central London? Within Zone 2? Within 60 minutes of HQ? Country house within a coach reach? Pick one. Agencies cannot quote on a flexible location radius.

The single biggest improvement most EAs can make. Share the working envelope.

Why this is counter-intuitive: there is a belief in some procurement traditions that withholding the budget makes agencies sharpen their pencils. In live event planning, it does the opposite. Agencies cannot quote sensibly without knowing the order of magnitude. If you hide it, the safer ones will assume mid-range and quote conservatively (you may lose the proposal you would actually want), and the bolder ones will guess high and price you out.

The language to use: “We are working to a budget envelope of approximately £X per head, in a total project range of £Y to £Z, all in excluding VAT. We are open to proposals slightly outside this range if the value case is strong.”

That language does three things at once. It tells agencies the working range. It tells them you have authority on it. And it leaves them room to push back if they think you are under-budgeting for what you are asking for.

“If the brief hides the budget envelope, the agency is guessing. The cheapest way to get a useful proposal back is to give the agency something honest to work with.” Mike Walker, Managing Director, MGN Events

The format section is short. A line on the broad shape of the evening: seated dinner with dancing, standing reception with grazing stations, drinks-then-event, party at a single venue, multi-room experience. Not three paragraphs of creative direction.

The point is to leave creative direction open for the agency to bring. If you have specified the theme, the colour palette, the entertainment style and the menu, you have asked the agency to be a procurement service, not a strategic partner. Most agencies will quote it as the procurement service that has been described.

What does belong here: must-haves and must-not-haves. The five to ten lines that matter on both sides.

Must-haves examples: a CEO speech moment at 8pm, a vegan main option, accessibility for a wheelchair user in the senior leadership team, a photographer for the brand team, finish by 11:30pm to align with last train logistics.

Must-not-haves examples: no fancy dress; no formal seated dinner (it overran last year); no awards element (handled separately); no internal speeches longer than five minutes.

Be sparing on both. The shorter the list, the more space the agency has to do its job.

Scope of agency role. What do you want them to own?

Three working options:

Full-scope: venue search, concept, production, supplier management, on-the-night delivery. This is what most large agencies quote against by default.

Part-scope: venue search and creative direction only, or production-only, or on-the-night delivery only. Some agencies do this; others do not. State which one you want.

Hybrid: agency leads the production; you keep stakeholder management and the run-of-show in-house. State it.

Decision process. The four lines no brief should miss:

Format of response (PDF, with what core sections). Deadline (a specific date, not “soon”). Decision date (when they will hear back). Decision-maker (who internally is the named lead, usually you).

If you do not state the decision process, agencies will ask. If you state it, they will spend more time on the proposal and less on chasing you for clarity.

Format. One page if possible, two if needed. Google Doc or PDF. Plain language. Bullets are fine for the audience/dates/scope sections. Prose is better for the objectives section.

Distribution. Three or four agencies is the right number. More than that wastes everyone’s time, including yours, in the comparison stage. Two is too few unless you already have a strong working relationship with one of them.

Send the brief to the agency’s named contact, not their general info inbox. If you do not have a named contact, ring once to introduce the brief.

Follow-up call. Expect every serious agency to ask for a 30-minute call within a week. Schedule it in advance. Some questions are best answered on a call rather than in email back-and-forth, particularly anything that touches on internal politics, the CEO’s involvement, or the parts of last year that fell short.

Response time. Give agencies at least 10 working days to respond well. Two weeks is better for anything above 300 guests. Compressing the response window does not produce better proposals; it produces faster, thinner ones.

We’re here to Help

If at any point in this process you would like a worked example of the brief MGN typically recommends for in-house owners writing their first agency-grade Christmas party brief, the team is happy to share it. Phone 01932 22 33 33 or email hello@mgnevents.co.uk.

If you are still upstream of this decision and not sure whether to brief agencies at all, the cluster’s piece on agency vs in-house Christmas party is the right starting point. If you have the budget envelope question to answer first, what £150, £200 and £300 per head actually buys is where to go.

A strong brief is the cheapest investment of time you will make on this whole project. It saves you weeks of comparison work, it improves the proposals you get back, and it sets the working relationship with whichever agency you pick on a footing of clarity rather than guesswork. That is what MGN’s corporate Christmas party service is built around.

Written by MGN Events, a UK creative events agency specialising in corporate events and brand experiences. The team is regularly briefed by in-house EAs, PAs and Office Managers running Christmas parties for 100 to 2,000 colleagues.