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Event Management Software Buyer's Guide
Table of Contents
- What is the meaning of event management?
- What is the Event Management Software?
- Is it worth investing in the Event Management System?
- Choosing the Best Event Management Software
- How does Event Management Software work?
- Key Features of the Event Management System
- Benefits of the Event Management System
- How to choose Best Event Management Software?
- Questions to ask a vendor when buying Event Management Software
- What is the Cost of Event Management Software?
- Conclusion
Organizing business events is quite a common task in an organization. These events may cater to different business needs. Events may be as big as a company day, product launch or open worlds to as small as a business meeting. It's not just organizing the event, but measuring the outcome of an event is very important. Here is where the Event Management System comes to help.
What is the meaning of event management?
The broader meaning of event management defines it as planning and managing a range of functions to execute organized events. For example, conferences, weddings, trade shows, conventions, seminars, concerts, ceremonies, and celebrations. While managing an event, you will need to plan the budget, handle the logistics, manage vendors and staff, and supervise the implementation of the event.
What is the Event Management Software?
An Event Management System is an application that is part of Project Management. An Event Management deals with the creation and development of events from large-scale to small-scale. Events refer to the public or private social gatherings like conferences, ceremonies, parties, concerts or conventions. There is numerous software available in the market to handle the events. Such software is referred to as Event Management Software.
The process of planning and coordinating an event is called Event Planning. At a high-level event planning includes budgeting, scheduling, working and coordinating with various stakeholders like transport, speakers, security, catering, third-party vendors, etc. An Event Management Software would also cater to Event Planning.
Is it worth investing in the Event Management System?
A well-organized event shows the company’s culture and its interest towards stakeholders. For instance, a Product Launch Event is one of the important events for a Product company. The success of the event directly impacts the future sales of the product. Without a good Event Management System this cannot be handled in a professional way. Also measuring the outcome of the event is very important to analyze the event’s impact on the attendees and/or the stakeholders.
Choosing the Best Event Management Software
Even before looking out for the Event Management Software in the market, start by prioritizing your needs. Different software caters to different needs. List down the pain points you are experiencing while planning for an Event. List down the key features which you think are necessary when opting for an Event Management Software. Then is the time to start evaluating the Best Event Management Software.
There is software available in the market which provides a wide range of features. Some software is quite popular for the ticketing solution for events ranging from small to large. They allow a wide range of customization and thus offer room to fit in the requirements.
Very few software offers end to end solutions. Such software enables you to seamlessly manage events from beginning to end. You can opt-in or opt-out features according to the needs. It helps in Event Registration, Marketing, and Ticketing.
Few project management software has embedded Event management systems in itself. They offer a strong visual interface, simple UI and collaboration events. It’s a good tracking tool to track each of the tasks.
Many event management software is available online as a SaaS subscription. This is one of the popular modes of adopting software, which saves implementation time and future support mechanisms.
And finally, your budget, with tons of software and a wide variety of features, try to choose the one which matches your budget.
How does Event Management Software work?
An Event Management Software helps the event planners in organizing the events from the event registration process until the event promotion and reporting. This software is used to manage the B2B and/or B2C professional events like Trade Shows, Professional Conferences, Internal Training, Networking Events, etc.
This software can also be used for other fun or cultural events like shows and concerts. Here the focus will be more on promotions, ticketing and sales.
Key Features of the Event Management System
Following are the different core components of the Event Management Software:
› EVENT WEBSITE: Companies used to rely on some third parties to build the Event website. Or if they have sufficient resources, the same could have been done in-house. But in either case, this website will not be integrated into the whole Event Management system. There used to be an additional cost in bringing this website-related data to the Event Management System.
An Event Management Software would provide a feature to build a Website with all related details about the event. This will be tightly coupled with the Event Management system. The websites can be built using drag and drop features. It will offer a wide variety of widgets to make the website look trendy. It offers room for customizations to fit in for the company’s needs like logo, themes, etc.
› EVENT REGISTRATION: This tool helps in processing registration and ticket sales (if applicable). In the past, organizers used to depend on other vendors who specialize in the registration processes. This might be useful depending on the needs.
The Registration tool which comes as part of the Event Management Software will help in the registrations and ticketing processes. This can also be customized based on the ticketing parameters. This tool will be easy to use and manage. They will be integrated with the payment gateway for the ticketing purpose.
› EVENT MARKETING: Once the Website and Registration process for the Event is completed, the next most important thing is marketing. Marketing place a very crucial role these days for the success of any event. In the past, this used to be handled by other vendors who are into marketing. One of the powerful marketing tools is Email Marketing.
Now that we have the Registration tool in-house to the Event Management Software, it is easy to collect and collate all the Email IDs of the attendees. The Event Marketing tool can use this Data Source to send relevant marketing details to the attendees or the set of people who have shown interest in this event. Bulk Emailing will be part of this Event Marketing tool.
With the growing social media platform, the Event Management Software also tries to cater to promoting the event on Facebook, Twitter or other Social media sites.
This tool also comes with the tracking mechanism to understand the impact of this marketing campaign. It should track the number of people registered, shown interest. This will help in scaling up or scaling down the event size.
› ATTENDEE ENGAGEMENT APP: For any event to be successful along with the great speakers and sessions, the participation of the attendee is also very important. They need to feel that they are also part of the ongoing event.
Before, the organizers used to depend on some third party engagement tool to capture the attention of the participants. These tools or apps always used to sit outside the Event Management system, and thereby no fully into the brand image of the event organizing company. Since it is not fully integrated, getting the relevant data to make meaningful information out of it was not so easy.
The new Event Management System will come with an integrated Attendee Engagement App that helps the attendees to build new networks, communicate with each other. With such engagement, the attendees will also feel that they are part of the event.
The Mobile event app for the attendees helps to provide all the necessary information about the event like the schedule, speaker profiles, list of other attendees, messengers to interact with each other, some online polls and surveys, etc.
Such experiences will enhance the participation and help the attendees to take full advantage of the Event that they are going to attend.
› REPORTING AND ANALYTICS: Before the Event Management System in place, all the above said features used to come from different vendors. Each used to act as a black box, and work in a silos mode.
With the Event Management System software in place, all the above said features will be available in a single database. This will help in getting all the relevant data right from Event Organizing through a website, Marketing, Sales and Participant engagement measure in one single place.
Various out of box reports and analytics will be available for different roles. This provides a good metric in analyzing which department did the best for an event, and which all departments need improvement.
Benefits of the Event Management System
Following are the different core components of the Event Management Software:
The Event Management system plays a very crucial role in this platform by:
› Wide Range of Tools: Offering a wide range of tools for building websites, Marketing, Sales and Ticketing, User Experiences, reporting, and analytics.
› Single Integrated Platform: Helping in making the event successful by offering all the tools in a single integrated platform.
› Efficiency: Helping the organizers save time & money, with a seamlessly integrated end-to-end system
› User-friendly application: Easy to use application interface and dedicated customer support team
› New Experience: Providing a new experience for the Attendees as well, and contribute to the overall success of the event.
How to choose Best Event Management Software?
Following are the different core components of the Event Management Software:
There are a number of factors that play an important role while you try to choose the best event management system software for your company.
› ALIGN TO THE STANDARDS: Any event management system software opted will finally be part of the company’s overall software ecosystem. Hence this software should also align and adhere to all the company’s standards. Event management software handles features like ticketing and promotions. Thus they have to work with attendees and stakeholder’s personal information like email and phone numbers. So it becomes very important to ensure that the system follows the global standards.
› ON-PREMISE VS CLOUD: The most popular version of the software is Cloud-based. They offer SaaS (Software as a Service) in a subscription model. Payments are defined based on a number of subscriptions and hence offer good scalability.
On-premise could be another option if your company has a good in-house IT team, who can maintain the installations, upgrades, and maintenance of the software.
› EASY TO USE: Any software for that matter should offer an easy to use and navigate UIs. The analytics and real-time reports must offer easy to understand and comprehend the information. The software should also provide some room for customization to suit the company’s needs.
The software should always provide some out of box integrations to a few of the standard systems. For instance, the events are mainly the outcome of projects. So these Event management systems should integrate seamlessly with the Projects Management systems.
› BUDGET FITMENT: Finally any system under consideration should fit into the budget that the company can offer. With all the requirements being listed out, and short listing the software with the required features, have a check on the budget.
Questions to ask a vendor when buying Event Management Software
1. What makes your event management software different from the other tools in the market?
2. How long have you been in this business?
3. How adaptable is your software to fit into my unique business requirements?
4. What is on offer when it comes to attendee engagement?
5. What kind of event branding capabilities does your solution provide?
6. In what ways does it simplify event registrations, management, and tracking?
7. Is it possible to add a payment gateway to accept event payments online?
8. Are there functions to send reminders, alerts, and follow-ups?
9. Will it make team collaboration smoother?
10. Does the system pack in analytic tools?
11. What about data security? What safety practices do you implement?
12. Do I have to add specific resources to make the most out of this solution?
13. Is on-the-go access available?
14. What all reports will I be able to generate?
15. Is it complex to get started with the system?
16. What will be the installation procedure?
17. Can the solution grow with my increasing business requirements?
18. Is technical support included in the package?
19. How can I reach the support team? Is there round-the-clock support?
20. When was the last time did you roll out an update?
21. How often the upgrades take place? Are the upgrades charged separately?
22. Which third-party integrations does the product support?
23. Can I customize the look and feel and specific features?
24. What is the maximum number of users can the system handle?
What is the Cost of Event Management Software?
Most of the Event Management Software is available online and in the SaaS subscription model. You can opt for only the features which are useful for your business needs. The major advantage is to pay as you use. Few of the starter packages with basic functionality come free. The paid packages come from $49/month and can go up till $199/month depending on the number of subscriptions (users) and features opted.
Conclusion
B2B and B2C events are becoming more and more prevalent these days for small, medium and large scale companies. For Apple, it could be the launch of a new version of iPhones and for Oracle; it could be the Open World event. For any other company, it could be the Company’s Annual Day or Conference. Such events are getting bigger and bigger and companies are very serious about the outcomes of such events. Without an efficient Event Management System in place, Organizing, managing and evaluating the desired outcome of an event is highly impossible.
To conclude, modern Event Management software is more than just an event organizer tool. For the overall success of any company’s events, this system is a great platform that empowers the organization.