This article was originally published on Forbes.com on August 19, 2026

Anticipating the challenges that can arise before and during the conference can help teams address them early and keep the event on track. Below, Forbes Communications Council members share the biggest challenges comms pros encounter when planning internal business conferences and how to successfully address them.

OUR TAKE:

15. Aligning Marketing And Comms Teams

When working on an internal conference, the marketing and communications teams need to work together. Such collaboration will enable the context that is critical to ensuring whatever is being shared resonates. - Rachel Kule, Pursuit PR

FULL ARTICLE:

19 Common Challenges Comms Teams Face When Planning Internal Conferences

Planning an internal business conference goes beyond just coordinating schedules and logistics. It means creating an experience that informs, engages and aligns employees around shared goals. With different teams, priorities and expectations coming together in one event, communications professionals have to consider both the practical details and the experience they’re creating for attendees.

1. Keeping Presentations Engaging And Interactive

Instead of allowing executives to read through 45-minute slide decks, we strictly limited standard presentations to 10-minute "lightning talks." The remaining time was converted into interactive “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) panels driven entirely by real-time, anonymous employee voting apps. If a slide didn't contain a visual narrative or crucial data, it was cut. - Gaetano Romeo, EasyVista

2. Keeping The Message Relevant For Everyone

The biggest challenge is keeping the content relevant for everyone. Unfortunately, it’s easy to put it on the back burner when it’s not direct revenue generation. That means content comes in late, it’s very focused on the sales team and doesn‘t drive a connected theme. This makes the role of marketing even more critical because we have the deepest insight into the culture and commercial message. Marketing must own the message, narrative and agenda in a proactive way. - Derek Thomas, Ryan

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3. Aligning Leadership Around One Message

In my experience, the biggest challenge isn't organizing the event. It's ensuring leadership is aligned around one clear message. Planning is essential, but leaders bring the strategy to life. When everyone shares the same purpose and communicates a consistent vision, the event becomes more than a meeting; it inspires people to take action. - Angela Cortez, Miraculous Corp

4. Holding Focus On The Topic Instead Of The Workday

It is always a challenge with any internal event to keep the team focused on the topic at hand and not defaulting to answering emails and calls throughout the day. One way to mitigate this is to build in email and call breaks throughout the day between topics. This lets the team know they can focus on the presentation and still have time to keep up or put out fires throughout the day. - Sarah Lero, Universal Engraving Group

5. Keeping The Main Objectives In Focus

Internal business conferences can easily lose focus if they try to serve too many purposes like team building, training, motivation, strategy or planning. Set clear priorities on what your goals for the event are and then plan your agenda to address them in order of importance. Provide side activities that let people shift gears and come back refocused, but don't lose sight of the main objectives. To paraphrase Stephen Covey: Remember the main thing is the main thing. - Tom Wozniak, OPTIZMO Technologies, LLC

6. Balancing Business Goals With Engagement

Balancing business, fun and team building while also achieving the conference's goals is always the biggest challenge. How do you land the message, maintain engagement and deliver what is usually dense content in a smaller timeframe without losing your audience and maintaining authenticity? The trick: expectation setting from the start, understanding the goals from senior leadership as well as the team attending, and setting clear markers between goals. - Michelle O'Connor, Converge Labs

7. Preparing Leaders For Authentic Q&A

One of the most challenging parts of planning an internal conference was preparing the Q&A sessions for employees. I brief leadership on the themes likely to come up and leave the exact answers unscripted. A leader speaking in their own voice is what resonates with employees the most. - Bisera Lakinska, M42 -Abu Dhabi Health Data Services

8. Turning Updates Into Two-Way Conversations

Company events have to prioritize creating a two-way conversation, not broadcasting updates—that could be an email. Employees are naturally predisposed to passively waiting to hear updates from leadership. But if leaders can engage employees directly with pre-meeting surveys or to ensure they program an agenda that speaks to their specific concerns, internal conferences are more productive. - Larisa Summers, Documo

9. Keeping Core Messages At The Forefront

One of the hardest challenges is making sure people do not leave with 10 different takeaways. Internal conferences often try to cover too much. We try to identify the one to three messages that matter most and build the experience around reinforcing them over and again. More than three priorities means that you aren't actually prioritizing. - Evan Nierman, Red Banyan

10. Aligning Stakeholders Around A Single Story

One of the hardest parts is aligning many stakeholders around a clear story while still making the event feel useful and real for employees. We tackle it by locking the narrative early, building one source of truth and running tight cross-functional reviews so programming, speakers and communications all reinforce the same message. - Rena Fallstrom, Glean

11. Designing For Diverse Employee Audiences

The hardest part of an internal conference is that the "internal audience" is a myth. One room holds the energized sales leader, the substance-hungry engineer, the new joiner and the quiet skeptic. Pitch to the average and you reach no one. We map those mindsets before the agenda, layer content so there's a headline for all and depth for some, and use live Q&A to meet each one. Unity at the top, relevance underneath. - Anshuman Dutta, Cognizant

12. Ensuring Alignment With Business Outcomes

One of the toughest challenges is creating an experience that informs, inspires and drives action rather than just sharing updates. The most successful internal conferences begin with business outcomes, not agendas. We align every session to a strategic objective, involve leaders early in the planning process, build opportunities for meaningful dialogue and measure success by what employees do differently afterward, not just attendance or event satisfaction. - Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions

13. Preventing Siloed Executive Presentations

The most difficult challenge when planning an internal business conference is overcoming "executive alignment inertia"—specifically, preventing senior leaders from hijacking the agenda to deliver isolated, hyper-tactical department updates that turn the event into a grueling, eight-hour reading of corporate slide decks. When individual business units operate in silos, their default instinct is to use their stage time to broadcast insular wins. - Patrick Ward, NanoGlobals

14. Making Agendas Relevant To Each Function

One of the hardest challenges is making the agenda relevant to every function without turning it into a collection of updates. We’ve tackled this by building the program around shared business questions, not departments: what’s changing, what decisions need alignment and what people should do differently afterward. That keeps the conference strategic, practical and useful. - Hope Frank, Wand AI

15. Aligning Marketing And Comms Teams

16. Resonating With Employees Of Different Experience Levels

I have planned annual summits for everyone in the organization that had marketing and communications in their duties, even those "other duties as assigned." The range of experience and quantity of work of the attendees was vast. I went outside of the organization and called upon colleagues within our industry who had, or were in the midst of, addressing a challenge that we as an organization were facing. The outcome was that their shared stories resonated across the board. - Kimberly Osborne

17. Ensuring Action After The Conference

What happens at the conference shouldn't stay at the conference. We build the agenda backward from what must change afterward, assign owners and close each session with clear actions or next steps. Employees should leave knowing how to apply the time to their day-to-day work. - Paula Mantle, Branch

18. Fostering Active Participation

One of the biggest challenges is maintaining employee engagement beyond the keynote sessions. I've addressed this by designing conferences as interactive experiences rather than one-way presentations, incorporating live Q&A, workshops, peer discussions and AI-powered polling. When employees actively participate and see clear connections between the content and their work, engagement, knowledge retention and post-event momentum increase significantly. - Kurt Allen, Notre Dame de Namur University

19. Maintaining Engagement Throughout The Day

The most difficult challenge with internal conferences is capturing genuine engagement from time-strapped employees. Build sessions and content around crowdsourced surveys and suggestions that identify pain points and areas of interest in advance. Mix in a few culturally relevant surprises, plenty of breaks, merch, good food and snacks—and limit each session time to 20 minutes! - Rodney Mason, Minty