What Can An Event Management Platform Do For You, Exactly?

The best event management professionals are those men and women who can keep the rapt attention of an audience for hours on end – and make it look easy. They’re those folks who can crunch numbers, analyze their resources, and puzzle out an intricate web of suppliers, staff, and locations in their head. They thrive under pressure, and they wouldn’t trade the high-speed environment of event planning for the world.

There’s a good chance that they – and many other event planners, for that matter – could easily get away with not using any technological tools to help them run their events. After all, they’re old hands at this, right? Why would they need extra gadgets to assist them with tasks they’re already capable of handling on their own?

That’s easy: just because you can accomplish a task on your own, doesn’t mean you have to. If there’s one thing veteran event planners – and really, anyone who’s ever risen to the top of any field – understand, it’s that one should always make a point of only doing as much work as absolutely necessary. There’s no sense wasting time on mundane, menial tasks when you can channel that energy into making your events better, right?

That’s why event management software exists – and why you should use it.

Of course, I don’t expect you to take my word alone for it. We’re going to talk specifics. We’re going to address precisely how an event management platform can make you a better event planner. 

A More Efficient Events Team

One of the most obvious benefits offered by event management software only becomes clear when it’s paired with mobile devices – collaboration. Traditionally, events teams had to keep in contact through walkie talkies, intercoms, email, or face to face contact. I don’t mean to imply that this was somehow a logistical nightmare.

Contacting your team leader was simple enough, as was getting in touch with the event organizer. The problem was that all of that took time. You needed to track down the person you were looking for. You needed to talk to them about the issues you were having; maybe they needed to reach someone else about them. Mobile technology streamlines this process considerably. It keeps everyone on the same page seamlessly.

With a mobile event management platform, employees can effortlessly keep in contact with one another, check the event schedule, or examine the show floor layout. It allows you to decentralize a lot of the things that is typically involved in managing a group of volunteers or event staff. That, in turn, means that everything runs quicker and more efficiently – always a good thing. 

Easy Registration

Another great thing about event management software is that it can be used to great effect during the registration process. Through a platform like Eventbrite or amiando, ticketing is a breeze. You can easily set up a payment portal with a wide array of different options or your guests; as simple for you to use as it is for them. Even better, the majority of registration platforms include at least some marketing component to them; Eventbrite, for example, lets you create your own custom-tailored event pages, focuses a great deal on SEO, and greatly boosts event discovery through social media integration, while also allowing you to send notifications to guests.

Without a registration tool such as this, you’re generally going to end up stuck coding your own registration portal from scratch – or else simply having to forego online payment. While the former is certainly something you can do if you’ve the time and technical inclination, it’s certainly not ideal. Platforms like Eventbrite are popular for a reason, after all; it’s because they’re simple and intuitive to both set up and use.

Plus, most of them are either free or priced reasonably enough that there’s not really any reason not to use them. 

Better Marketing

Let’s be honest here. Marketing is…well, it’s not exactly easy. You often need to keep track of as much information in your marketing campaign as you do with the event yourself – something that’s a more or less insurmountable task if you’re attempting to accomplish it unaided.

Thing is, the modern web is all about promotion. If you play your cards right, you’ve a nearly infinite audience that you can pitch your event to – thousands upon thousands of prospective attendees who might potentially be interested in swinging by. Here’s the kicker, though: if you’re not running a solid marketing campaign, they probably aren’t going to be able to find you.

“When your events become detailed and complicated enough to need their own website and require serious promotion,” reads a post on the Capterra blog, “you’ll find that dedicated event management systems have more advanced marketing features than simple membership management solution.”

Typically, the post continues, event management platforms include a website designer, social promotion tools, email marketing tools, and access to promotional listings. They may also include analytics and SEO tools to help you optimize and market your website via search engines. This is in addition to the standard features of a membership management/CRM platform. 

Reduced Costs, Increased Profits

The capacity that event management tools give you to more efficiently visualize your events and manage your team, registration, and marketing ultimately means you’ll need to spend less time and fewer resources trying to keep everything running. You’ll be able to devote more of yourself to improving your event, while increased visibility means you’ll find problems before they become too significant.

There are a few advantages worth noting here:

• Less money spent on labor costs. Due to greater efficiency, you may not need to hire as many volunteers or event staff.
• Can track down and eliminate areas of overspending before they become a problem. Self-explanatory.
• More efficient and effective management of partners and vendors. You’ll be able to see exactly how much you’re buying, how much you’re being charged, and how much you might save going with the competition.
• Less money spent on marketing. Centralizing your marketing efforts onto your event platform means you might not need to hire an outside consultancy to handle the process for you.
• In short, using the right event management software can help you reduce the cost of your events – and turn a greater profit, as a result.

Fewer Headaches Related To Logistics

Events can be downright overwhelming to run on your own. There are so many different tasks to deal with; so many processes you need to work through and so many problems you have to solve that it’s a wonder anyone’s capable of doing the job at all. This is particularly true of larger events which may require attendees to travel from other locations, putting the onus on you to help manage itineraries, flight details, pickup schedules, and hotels.

“When your event planning process starts to overwhelm you and gets overly complex, an event management system can provide more workflow management to help you organize tasks and processes for your events,” explains the Capterra Blog. “Typically they will provide the functionality to track task completion as the timeline progresses, set automated “to-do” emails to be sent out to various staff members to remind them of due dates for certain tasks or projects, create a complete task list, assign certain approval rights to specific people, and schedule reminders, confirmations, invitations, follow-up emails for after the event, and other types of notes.”

“Having a system so that [you] can transfer information without having to pay for anything extra is a big bonus where travel and housing is concerned,” the piece adds.

Closing Thoughts

Regardless of your profession, the tools you use can make all the difference in the world. This is especially true in event planning, which often requires one to manage a nigh-overwhelming volume of different variables. Of course, many veteran event planners are capable of handling all this stuff on their own.

That doesn’t mean they will, however. They’ve been in the industry long enough to understand that the more of your workload you can automate; the more of the event planning process you can cut out and leave to an application, the better you can make your events. The fact that you can save yourself a great deal of time and effort by doing so is an added bonus, of course.

So, in summary, what can event management software do for you?

• Improve communication with your events team, making them more efficient.
• Allow you to quickly and easily manage ticketing and payments.
• Help you along in the marketing process, increasing visibility for your event and increasing attendance as a result.
• Streamline many of the more mundane aspects of event planning, reducing both cost and effort involved in running an event.
• Help you better visualize every aspect of your event, allowing you to better ferret out any problem points.
• Provide you with a platform that allows you to easily control and address the various logistical concerns involved with planning an event.

Seems like a good idea to use one to make the best event possible, in the easiest way for you.