Sussex Team Event

'We have had a few emails thanking us for inviting people and how they thought it was the best event they have attended in a long time.'
Tracy Matthewson: American Express

Cumulus Outdoor Events was approached by one of our colleagues within the events industry (Mind Adrenaline) to run a one day team event for their client American Express. We have a very open and effective working relationship with the guys from Mind Adrenaline. We assist with some of their outdoor team events that they are asked to organise by their clients and we ask them to help with providing some delivery aspects of for some of our events. It's a great arrangement that helps both of our sets of clients to benefit from each other's areas of expertise.

On this occasion, we were asked to design and deliver a team event for 50 people from American Express at Buxted Park in Sussex.

Their requirements were:

• The participants were to have a lot of fun
• The event is to help encourage networking within the group
• Team members were to experience the benefits of working and succeeding together

To make full use of the stunning venue that Buxted Park has to offer and to achieve the objects, we felt that the day had to be split into two parts; the first being very structured and focused around specific teams and challenges that were placed at strategic locations around the venue. The second half of the day was to be more fluid and flexible, enabling teams and team member to interact for the benefit of everyone. Linking the two would be an interactive session that would take place over lunch.

In the morning, we organised various team building tasks to enable each team to spend time together and focus on themselves and specific individuals within each team. This was combined with an image based treasure hunt to give teams time to experience the venue and give them time to walk and discuss key themes. This was extended to more indoor based information gathering over lunch that helped to start the process of the teams interacting with each other.

The afternoon was also based around a series of smaller challenges. This time, teams had to interact, liaise and barter with each other, swapping experiences, resources and skills in order for everyone to achieve. This was less structured and relied upon the group itself to manage themselves, resources and the timescales.

It was a great event and scored 100% in our customer satisfaction survey!