Big Help in Small Places: 8 Event Tech Solutions Growing in Popularity

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With an event pending, your list of basic concerns is obvious: venue, flights, accommodations, ticketing, payments, registration, and check-in. After that, badge management, meeting room scheduling, and attendance seating and booking.

Choosing a management software is so crucial, that your choice can either leave needs unfulfilled or provide a delightfully well-managed event experience. Though you know you can’t anticipate everything, suppress the urge to dedicate several thousand dollars, close your eyes, throw your phone at the spreadsheet of popular choices, and hope for the best.

Check these software providers for packages with customizable price levels, travel and accommodations help, conference space or meeting area diagrams, badge tools like print-out or RFID, and barcode or QR code use options. Look for private chat group options, meeting links to RSS feeds or social media, and access to speaker profiles. Check for the ability to accept and direct bids, proposals, or documents, collect and prioritize attendee info, send branded messaging to groups, or connect to social media.

Meeting Evolution’s products help obtain venues and attendee housing and offer event marketing and post-event reporting. Services can be obtained as a suite of products, or separately, in modules such as ME Request for meeting requests, ME Sourcing for location sourcing, and ME Registration that offers a rate structure for unlimited meetings or per meeting, depending on your budget. ME Mobile allows for floor plan views, discussion groups, and attendee connections. ME Suite offers “end-to-end full meeting lifecycle solutions.” Toll-free phone or email support M-F, 8-8. Price is $250/month/user.

EventPro Software’s 30 options can be used separately or bundled, and include booking, travel, accommodations, registrations, online invoicing/payments, shared calendar, booking inquiries and booth management, sales and staff management, attendee management, floor plans, personalized dashboards, client and prospect communications, and communication tracking. EventPro offers personalized databases and can be used with desktop software, and via a local network or the Cloud. The device functionality list includes Windows Desktop and phone, iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, Android tablet or phone, Linux HTML5, and Blackberry 10.

Boomset’s check-in app lets you import guest lists by integrating with popular registration platforms to add guests, edit names, print badges on demand, and even has a customizable badges capability. Its products include a user-friendly kiosk self check-in option that allows for photo and signature capture, on-site selfie badge printing, along with full NFC-enabled capabilities. The Lead Retrieval app can read barcodes, scan and prioritize leads, and enable note-taking. The Smart Sessions component allows for speaker profiles through connection to Kiosk Mode, seating monitoring, the ability for attendees to manage their schedules, and ability to monitor session attendance. Boomset is implementing RFID tracking, cashless payment, and other new features, introducing all this and more to offer conference, meeting, and event planners a seamless on-site event solution. Boomset works on iOS and Android devices and via a web platform and offers a free trial.

The Attendease software enables registration and check-in with customizable forms, confirmation messaging and personalized event scheduler, pass creation and management, and attendee grouping capability. Other features are billing and payments handled directly with no need for separate merchant accounts, financial report generation, location capacity with wait list report, surveys and data capture with on-demand reports, and upgradable mobile event app available in native iOS and Android–for push notifications, meeting tracking, and “favoriting” for attendees, in-app notetaking and messaging, and social media integration. Ask about the free trial.

EventPoint has been providing event management solutions since 1999. Currently, the cloud-based event management platform includes a variety of tools and services including mobile apps, speaker management, session and speaker content tools, and data services/analytics packages.

Event Insight from Validar‘s product list comprises a registration capability with check-in and badge printing, Event Ticket, attendee tracking, RFID session tracking, real-time dashboards, gamification, social media integration, session attendee tracking, lead capture with prioritization and retrieval, event surveys and attendee feedback capture, and post-event reports.

Conferize aims to create a universal event solution, “where all digital needs seamlessly are solved in one cloud across all devices.” With Conferize, you can create a mobile responsive event website, handle registration, and build a whole social community. The all-in-one tool is free with the option to upgrade to a pro version which allows organizers to use their own domain, and limits the amount of Conferize branding on their event website.

Meeting Application’s event app features a photo booth, social channel feed to increase traffic, real-time flexible agenda, maps and floor plans, Webpage direction, surveys and voting capability, media upload capability, in-conference messaging/chat, and push notifications for schedule changes. Find also:  Social channel integration, survey capability, speaker profiles, capability for attendee profile set-up, capability for revenue-producing banner ads, and a 14-day free trial app. Meeting Application offers tutorials and customer care via telephone or email. It works with iPhone, iPad, and Android. The price is $1499.

 

These excellent choices should give you solutions to some of your main challenges, and bonus features for some additional issues as well. With technology changing and evolving so quickly, it’s good to know the areas of coverage that you can expect from the new software on the block. Happy planning!