Put up to 200 IT professionals in a large room. Add food, cocktails, wagon parts, and a charity incentive. What do you get? An incredible mixer that’s perfect for networking!

This summer, we were on the scene at the F5 Agility Conference held in Chicago, Illinois. Our mission was to carry out a Wagon Builders™ Giving Stations event for upwards of 200 conference attendees.

If you’re not familiar with our Giving Stations events, they’re aimed at large groups whose primary goal is networking. And at F5 Agility, networking is definitely on the agenda!

SEI Workshops & Incentives Chose Wagon Builders™ for their Event

Our client, SEI Workshops & Incentives, wanted a fun way for 150-200 high-end IT professionals to mingle and get to know one another. Giving Stations gets them working together on fun projects that gives them a common goal. In this case, it was building little red wagons for kids, then filling those wagons with fun treats.

Giving Station events are a little different from our traditional charity workshops. Whereas the workshops are about team building and giving back, the Giving Station events are really all about the building of the donations, plus the interaction.

No team building per se, although bonds do get formed!

For the F5 Agility event, it was a cocktails and dinner buffet mixer. Our Giving Stations event was part of it, so we worked our activities around drinks and food.

Giving Stations Pulled Everyone Together for a Common Cause

Attendees at the buffet sat at tables, and each table built a wagon. Then they filled it with treats for the kids who would receive them. The format really works at events like this one, since it gives strangers something to talk about (and do!).

First, there was a welcome announcement, and then there was an icebreaker. We used our classic crowd pleaser called “Air Counting”, where partners guess what numbers are being drawn by one another. It really works well to warm people up to the notion of opening up their lines of communication (sort of like cocktails!).

It Was All Topped Off by a Speech From the Charity

Wagons were to go to kids at the Ronald McDonald House – Chicagoland. Towards the end of our Giving Stations event, a representative arrived to accept the wagons.

He also gave a presentation to the group, and let everyone know they’d made a different that evening. It was a wonderful way to end the evening!