Make your event management experience even more delightful

Event Management News

September 26, 2017

According to Forbes, event planners are ranked #5 as one of the most stressful jobs. We feel your pain! To help make things easier, the Attendease team has set an important goal – to constantly innovate in order to provide the very best experience for event planners. Recently we received recognition, ranking in the Top 20 Most User-Friendly Event Management Software Solutions out of 400 competitors.

Today, we took one step closer to hitting that goal.

We are delighted to introduce a design refresh of the Attendease interface. The new look and feel was created to make the event management experience even more seamless. The first phase of our design refresh is underway and our users can start exploring Attendease to see ongoing design improvements.

Here is a new feature to make your returning attendees happy: Instant Registration.

The name of the feature speaks for itself. Returning event registrants can be fully registered with just one click without entering their information again (note: this is possible if it is a free event!)

If you are curious to learn more, take a visual tour into the possibilities of Attendease!

BOOK A DEMO

Attendease is an event automation platform for corporate event teams built to enable a repeatable, scalable event planning and execution process.

5 Best Event Planning Challenges & Solutions

Event Management News

September 13, 2017

The best part of being an event planner can also be the worst. The variety, excitement and increasing responsibility of your job is what you love, but it also can keep you up at night.

It’s very likely that these 5 event planning challenges have led to a few sleepless nights – but read on and learn how to master some of your most difficult event marketing obstacles.

Challenge #1 – Selling those tickets

What if no one shows up? All the event planning you do is for nothing without an audience, so how about a few things to to boost attendance?

Generate social media buzz from those who already get it. Encourage registrants to share your event using prominent social buttons or pop-ups on registration pages. Leading up to the event, send out exciting, sharable speaker and networking updates.
Ask for referrals – and make it worth their while. Incentivize your attendees to share your event, or better yet sign-up a colleague through contests, two-for-one offers, VIP benefits and swag.
Pick up dropped registrations, and bring them all the way home. With thoughtful target marketing and a series of strategic emails, reach out and convert those who stalled midway through registration.

Challenge #2 – Shrinking event budgets

Feeling the pressure to provide increasingly sophisticated events for lower budgets? Most event planners are in the same boat, so what if you could do more with less?

Realize that inexpensive event websites and registration pages are possible. You don’t need a web design team to do it either. Look for an event tech solution with flexible registration forms, and beautiful customizable website templates.
Recruit creative sponsorship. Support doesn’t have to be in the form of cash, although that works too. Event sponsorship can be services, refreshments or giveaways. Treat sponsors well with lots of recognition, and they’ll be asking to be back next year.
Negotiate effectively. Do your research to understand what is a fair price for similar products or services and bring that to your preferred suppliers. Discounts are rarely offered to those who don’t ask.

Challenge #3 – Doing it all yourself

Event marketers are often expected to be designer, team lead, marketer, sales and finance experts. Ready to avoid a sure-fire way to overwhelm?

Delegate what you can. It’s an often-repeated, but not often followed piece of advice. As an event planner, you’re probably a bit of a Type A perfectionist, but doing it all yourself leads to burnout.
Eliminate unnecessary work. From re-creating recurring events from scratch each year to tedious data entry while using tools that aren’t integrated, great event automation technology can become your best friend.
Know when to bring in the experts. As events grow, some resources need to grow as well. For example, what aspects of your work would be best given to a financial expert or speakers liaison?

Challenge #4 – Juggling your software, digital channels and apps

You’ve probably got a bucket load of lead generation, web design, project planning, social media, and team collaboration tools as part of your worklife. How about coordinating them easily all in one place using event planning software?

Integrate lead management sales and marketing software. Are you already using tools like Hubspot or Salesforce? Seamless integration is essential for your whole marketing team, filling up your pipeline with robust details about attendees.
Generate automated emails and notifications. You need to be able to instantly reach out to attendees before, during after the event. Sharing interesting, insider content is a sure fire way to keep them engaged.
Deliver real-time, secure and engaging online attendee surveys. For recurring events, make sure the survey questions are very similar year-after-year for comparison’s sake.

Challenge #5 – Tracking and measuring event ROI

Wondering how much pipeline was actually created from your last event? Others in your organization likely are too. Here’s how to measure some of that impact.

Develop KPIs that make sense for your business. Measuring for measurements sake is not effective. Instead ensure the whole team knows what the primary and secondary goals are for each event. Revenue, sales leads, membership?
Get the right tools to understand the whole story. Did you know you can easily track, measure and analyze your events using an integrated event management software?
Review, refresh and refine your events plan. So many event planners are responsible for 3 or more repeatable events each year. Use your ROI analysis to make changes that will have the most impact next time.

Event professionals can have it all. Get some balance (and sleep) back in your life by embracing and mastering these event planning challenges.

Attendease is a cloud-based marketing automation solution for corporate event managers and teams. A modern, feature-rich event management software that enables the management of an entire range of events of all types and sizes.

How an Event Automation Platform Helps You Avoid Event Management Issues

Event Management News

August 23, 2017

Event marketers are inevitably stretched for time, with never-ending To-Do lists and limited resources. Under these intense conditions, it’s no surprise that issues arise. Unfortunately, in the running of a successful event, there’s little margin for error. Attendees have high ROI expectations and low tolerance of problems that compromise their experience.

Thankfully, an event automation platform can save the day. Even if you’re a team of one, you can pull off a sophisticated, streamlined event that wows your attendees—all without breaking a sweat. With an event automation platform, you can delegate most of your routine event tasks to the platform and focus instead on functions that contribute to attendee experience, lead generation, and ROI.

The goal of an event automation platform is to simplify the event management process by delegating and automating as many tasks as possible. Automation eliminates time-consuming and error-prone manual processes and ensures a professional event that comes off without a hitch.

Here are some examples of how an event automation platform can help you avoid common event management pitfalls:

Common Issues	How an Event Automation Platform Can Help You
Changes to event information are not updated across all channels	Event automation affords global control of assets. You only have to update once and your edits are implemented across all applicable channels. For example, you may need to change a speaker at the last minute. Without an event automation platform, you must update the agenda, speaker list, and event website. But now, instead of this onerous task, you can make one edit and all channels are updated automatically.
Accidental session overlap or exceeding room capacity	Smart scheduler saves you from yourself; it won’t allow you to schedule sessions that overlap, nor book the same speaker to present at two places at one time. You can also stop worrying about managing room capacity by capping the number of attendees per room and letting your event automation platform manage the rest.
Wasted hours & resources recreating similar events	If you have repeating events, there’s no need to recreate them every time. You can simply pick the specific elements you want to clone (website, registration forms, email blasts etc.) and recreate the event with the click of a button.
Poor lead data management, including errors importing & exporting leads	The solution: integrations with Slack, Salesforce & HubSpot. There’s no need to export or import your data; the whole process is automated for you. An event automation platform will send you weekly reports on event performance directly to Slack, and let you nurture event leads in HubSpot or Salesforce. Never worry about forgetting to follow up, losing contacts, or leaving leads languishing without due attention.
Disjointed, inefficient management of multiple events or different event teams	If you are an event marketer with a portfolio of events, or you have different business teams working on events, event automation software will help you seamlessly manage permissions, authentications, security, and access. No more admin headaches!
Too much time & resources allocated to launching event website	With an event automation platform, you can create a professional event website in minutes—without a team of designers. There’s no need to struggle with web design, create a layout from scratch, or hire a developer. Just pick the template you like, customize it, and voila! Your branded website is ready to go.

If you’d like to see how the Attendease event automation platform can optimize your event registration process—and ensure happy attendees—check out www.eventupplanner.com for a demo.

New features to improve attendee experience

Event Management News

August 10, 2017

We are pleased to introduce two new platform features that will help you improve pre-event attendee experience and convert and delight your prospects: conditional fields and Grouse Theme, another stunning event website template. In addition, we launched three powerful integrations with Slack, Hubspot and Salesforce.

What is a Conditional Registration Form Field?

Conditional fields are a powerful marketing tool for improving your registrant’s form submission experience. No more inflexible form fields that are not personalized or tailored to the needs of each attendee. Now you have the ability to build dynamic registration forms that use conditional logic. Choose whether a question is visible or hidden, based on a registrant’s selections in previous fields.

For example, you can ask attendees if they have any dietary requirements. If the answer is YES, they will see additional questions that will give you better understanding of their specific food requirements. If they answer “NO”, they will automatically be sent to the next question without specifying food preferences.

Grouse Theme: Customizable Event Website Templates

We’ve added one more stunning new theme to our library! Our Grouse Theme includes modern, easily-customized website themes for your events. Grouse has universal site structure that could work perfectly for a business conference, an internal event, or a webinar. And, of course, you can fully customize it so it has your brand’s look and feel. Save time and resources by using beautiful templates from our library.

*Grouse Theme availability depends on the subscription plan, please contact [email protected] for details.

Stay on top of your events with Attendease Integrations

Integrations are an event marketer’s shortcut to create a seamless, error-free attendee management process. HubSpot, Slack, Salesforce—three big Attendease integrations to automate your event lead management and simplify your life. Each integration has unique benefits for event planner; learn more about each in a separate blog post here.

If you are curious to learn more, take a visual

tour into the possibilities of Attendease!

BOOK A DEMO

Attendease is an event automation platform for corporate event teams built to enable a repeatable, scalable event planning and execution process.

Stay on Top of Your Events with Attendease Integrations

Event Management News

July 20, 2017

The role of integrating your event management solution with other cloud tools in event planning and execution is to simplify lead management and create a seamless, error-free attendee management process. Attendease is proud to announce the launch of three big integrations that will enable you to automate your attendee management process and delegate this task to your event platform.

HubSpot Integration

HubSpot is a powerful Inbound marketing automation software that helps companies manage their sales and marketing pipeline. The Attendease integration with HubSpot extends your marketing stack and helps drive more strategic value from your events.

Why Integrate Attendease with HubSpot?

Triggered by an attendee registration, flow your event lead data into HubSpot
Track your attendee actions: session registrations, personal information updates, waiting list status, check-ins or cancellations
Set up lead nurturing or marketing campaigns for your attendees
Create smart lists based on various actions of your attendees for more targeted campaigns
Use pre-set filters to enable an in-depth view into your event lead data

Slack Integration

Slack brings all your communication together in one place. It’s real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. The Attendease integration with Slack helps keep your events, marketing and executive teams in the know about your corporate events.

Why Integrate Attendease with Slack?

Get instant notifications in Slack about event registrants, cancellations, payment and other attendee actions
Set up daily Slack reports with all important event data you want to track
See notifications about the status of your event (date and time published, changes, etc.)
Simple, one-step integration process
Create separate Slack channels for each event

Salesforce Integration

Sell, service, and market smarter with Salesforce. The Attendease integration with Salesforce has been improved and now drives more value from your event leads!

Why Integrate Attendease with Salesforce?

Consolidate all event data in one place
Run pre-event and post-event campaigns for event registrants
Analyze and get a deep dive into your event data

Unifying multiple tools into a single platform allows you to have a holistic and comprehensive view of your business and ROI. The new integration possibilities of Attendease provide event marketers with an in-depth look into their events and enable better management of event leads.

Contact us to learn more.

New Video Block

Event Management News

July 17, 2017

new video block

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Multiple Attendee Registration, Video and New Event Website Templates

Event Management News

July 6, 2017

We are very excited to announce the new features of the EventUp Planner (formerly Attendease platform) that will help you create memorable events for your attendees. So, what’s new in July:

Multiple Attendee Registration

This long-awaited platform feature will allow a single person to register multiple attendees for an event, each with individual personal details, during the same registration occurrence and payment instance. It’s a perfect solution for corporate attendees that come to your event as a group or want to pay from a business account. Multiple attendee registration is a huge time-saver and a very useful feature that helps to improve the event registration experience for your attendees.

Video hero

According to the latest Nielsen research, 64% of marketers expect video to dominate their strategies in the near future. Our latest event website innovation lets you leverage the power of video marketing without any technical difficulties. Easily embed a video into the hero block of the website with the click of a button.

Pine Theme: New Event Website Templates

We are proud to announce the launch of the Pine Theme, our newest addition to the library of event website designs. Pine offers modern-looking, easily-customizable event website templates that will help you create a stunning website for your event or webinar. Create your event website in less than an hour: simply select Pine and customize it with your logo, colours and content!

*The Pine Theme availability depends on the subscription plan, please contact [email protected] for details.

If you are curious to learn more, take a visual tour into the possibilities of EventUp Planner (fomerly Attendease.)

BOOK A DEMO

EventUp Planner (formerly Attendease) is an event automation platform for corporate event teams built to enable a repeatable, scalable event planning and execution process.

Capterra Ranks Attendease as Top 20 Most User-friendly Event Management Software

Event Management News

June 12, 2017

We don’t want to brag (ok, maybe just a little) but Capterra recently named us to its Top 20 Most User-friendly Event Management Software list. Capterra evaluated 400 event management solutions in its annual review, rewarding points for usability, customer service, and average reviews scores. We’re thrilled to be named the 12th most user-friendly solution. Plus, Attendease event management software ranks the highest among those serving mid market and enterprise customers.

Twelve years ago, Attendease started as a trio of friends with a dream of creating an event management and automation platform that would enable event planners to grow and scale their events with ease. We wanted to develop a user-friendly tool that would help event marketers run successful events of all types and sizes, without needing an army of developers and designers.

“At Attendease, we understand the frustration of struggling with unwieldy event management platforms with cumbersome interfaces and complicated processes. The struggle is over.

Our modern event management software makes planning, launching, and managing your events a simple, worry-free experience—whether you’re a team of 20 hosting a national user group conference or an army of one planning a webinar.

event registration software, event management software

So what makes Attendease so user-friendly?

Fully-branded event websites in minutes
Customizable drag-and-drop Event Registration forms
Visual event Scheduling tools
Customizable Pricing, Passes, and Promo codes
Real-time event website updates
Seamless integration with sales and lead tools, like Salesforce and Hubspot
Personalized attendee experience
Responsive web app + advanced mobile app
At-a-glance tracking and measurement of event performance

We’re thrilled that Capterra, one of the most reputable review sites in the industry, has recognized how simple it is to create and manage an unlimited number of events with our visual event management tools. With Attendease, event marketers can publish and manage their entire portfolio of events simultaneously, regardless of type, size, or date. Plus, Attendease lets you clone an existing event and publish it in minutes! So it’s no surprise that, of all the corporate event management platforms targeted at enterprises, Capterra ranked Attendease highest on the ‘user-friendly’ scale.

We’re no stranger to accolades (we won the Event Technology Award for Best Event Website / Mobile Site in 2016) but the Capterra award is a true feather in our cap, honoring one of our core strengths—an intuitive, user-friendly experience.

Want to see Attendease in action?

Book a demo and see for yourself how easy it is to create and manage world-class events.

Exciting New Features of the Attendease Platform

Event Management News

May 25, 2017

Today we are thrilled to announce a bunch of new features and enhancements that will provide you with greater flexibility to develop, manage, and execute your event management strategy using the Attendease platform. The best part? You don’t have to wait – they’re available today.

All of your events – all in one place

Organizations that manage multiple events may wish to feature them in a central listing. We call this an event portal. Now Premium and Enterprise customers will be able to launch a microsite that can include unlimited event listings. Each listing can be featured on an individual page and can be configured to display only certain events (based on meta information). Lists can also be segmented and ordered according to your requirements. The event portal microsite can be customized and managed using Attendease’s new drag-and-drop, wysiwyg content management system.

Support for multiple languages

We are also launching support for organizations with multiple languages. Now Premium and Enterprise customers are able to build a set of translations that can be used across all your events and event portals. Translations are added to a central repository where they can be edited and added to over time. When translation strings are added to a website template, new events that use the template can be configured to display in the language selected during event creation.

Like it? Duplicate it!

Since launching our new content management system, users have requested the ability to duplicate pages – and we listened! Now pages can be duplicated, saving you valuable time during event site setup. If you’ve created a page layout that will be replicated, simply duplicate the page to maintain design consistency and save time.

Single Sign On (SSO)

Now Premium and Enterprise customers can enable support for single sign on, or SSO, which allows your attendees to sign up once and save time when registering for future events. If your events use global registration fields you can set them up to prefill if a user has already filled in that question for a previous event.

No payment? No check out required

When we first launched our new content management system, a check out screen was required for all events. Users requested that this step should be removed for free events – again we listened! Now events that do not require payments will not require the registrant to confirm on the checkout screen.

We have also made a number of small enhancements and fixes to improve the user experience of Attendease. Here are some of them:

– Show loading message when event listing block loads

– Fix rendering of pages when there is no trailing slash in the URL.

– Fix the missing “Save Site Template” section for Organization Owners.

– Fix mobile styles for the registration block to add padding on mobile.

– Fix the save button feedback for saving templates on BUs

– Fix file upload (rivets issue)

– Fix the saving of the registration form when the checkout screen is skipped for free events

– Fix spacing on nested views for presenters, sessions and venues

– Fix to shorten text on the password reset screen so the button displays more nicely

– Fix to make sure default toggle values are reflected in block preferences

– Update label text on requires_account registration option to reflect more accurate functionality

– Fix “null” values appearing on global fields when there is a blank value

– Fix issue that was displaying an error when surveys were filled in without all their required fields

– Fix an issue where the ical calendar file for multi-session was displaying duplicate location information in the description

– Fix the event listing display in the admin dashboard for long event names

– Fix the page editor so you don’t need to reload the page when switching between pages

– Fix spacing above Watch Now button in the Event Info block

– Remove the automatic lowercasing of field labels in the form builder

– Fix the broken display of BU hierarchy

– Fix spontaneous re-ordering of site manager pages.

– Fix display of blocks in IE11

– Fix erroneous promo code logic when entering an invalid code

– Remove the session count on the tabs of the Schedule Block

If you don’t see a particular feature in your Attendease dashboard, please contact us to upgrade and/or onboard your organization.

Smart Corporate Event Management And Your EventTech Budget

Event Management News

March 31, 2017

Events come in all shapes and sizes, but in most cases, it is a company’s larger marquee events that earn the highest acclaim from peers, prospects and partners. However, with the success of those larger events, comes bigger budgets and added costs required to run those events without a hitch. The idea of creating ongoing engagement and finding ways to continuously connect and create product facetime with customers is often better achieved through smaller, regularly scheduled events throughout the year.

Managing this collection of events, event marketing teams tend to focus on the costs for event planning tools and technology on an event-by-event basis, striving for success with a strong event ROI for each event. Ultimately, this may not be the most effective, results-driven strategy for creating a winning portfolio. Certainly the success of each event is imperative, but also looking at how your event portfolio is performing as a whole, what is working and not working and being able to tailor events to your customer profiles will ensure longer term value to the company. A solution that allows you the efficiency and productivity to do more events will drive a larger overall ROI for your portfolio, generating stronger results overall.

In a world enabled by online, subscription-based corporate event software solutions that can flow data between each other, making one-off decisions on an event-by-event basis could mean higher costs. In addition, you will not be maximizing your return on those tools or making the best long-term decisions for your event portfolio. Licensing event subscription software enables you to amortize the costs of a platform across more events, boosting your leads and improving your long-term ROI. It also enables event portfolio analysis to inform future event decisions.

Utilizing event management software across multiple events enables a more strategic view of how to best showcase your brand on a larger scale.

For example: Spending $25,000 on the event technology, registration, and a website required to run one big event may seem reasonable, but if you take a wide-angle view, you could discover that spending $40,000 across one large conference, 12 webinars, 6 product seminars, and 11 customer breakfasts or product tours would give you a significantly higher ROI, and save you money and drive 2-3x more valuable leads or customer relationships in the long run.

Through implementing Saas event management software across all events, you will build a deeper relationship with your customers, gather more data points on prospects, and garner more leads.

The best way to maximize your spending, boost ROI, and enhance your event portfolio management, is to look at your event planning on a macro level. Taking a larger-scale perspective when it comes to implementing a corporate event management software solution will save you money and time, enabling you to build deeper connections with your customers, generate more leads, and cut costs.

About Attendease

Looking for the best event management software in the market? Atteandease is an award winning event management platform trusted by teams running some of the world’s biggest, most exciting, design-forward and tech-advanced events. At Attendease, we believe that having the most effective events as part of an overall digital marketing strategy is all about giving organizations the right code, design and access to innovations. With ultimate flexibility in design and integrations, the Attendease powerful platform helps teams focus on developing amazing events that grow great companies. For more information, visit www.eventupplanner.com.