More and more to do, more needs to meet, more results to deliver — and often with fewer and fewer resources: life for anyone organising events does not get simpler with the passing days. So it becomes ever more crucial to have the best tools for the job, ones that make day-to-day work and procedures easier and can produce results without weighing too heavily on the budget.
How do you hold all of that together? Until not long ago the biggest problem was finding adequate event management software, because the choice was limited and performance often fell short of expectations. But what about today, when the market looks positively crowded? How do you find your way without the search and selection turning into a job of its own, swallowing excessive amounts of time and energy?
By asking the right questions, first of all, and only then looking at who out there can actually help you deliver your plans.
And the most useful questions, we think, are these three:
1. What features does the event management software I am looking for need to have?
It is such a basic question that it seems trivial. And yet, believe it or not, it is the one that people caught up in day-to-day operations ask least often. Not because they do not know what they need: they know perfectly well which problems have to be solved, which constraints have to be worked around and which opportunities have to be pursued. After all, in these articles we are talking to people with years of experience in the events business, or in companies that run internal or external events.
Often, though, this question stays generic and never goes to the depth needed to produce genuinely useful answers. Take a simple example: “I need to manage access control“, which is one of the things we are asked most often. Put like that, the question is too broad to yield an answer that leads to a genuinely useful solution.
What does “manage access control” mean?
How, when and where does this access have to happen?
What is meant by “control”?
How flexible will the system need to be?
And what cost range does it have to stay within?
Questions of this kind should be asked for every area of the event you expect to have to cover and where you expect support from the event software you are going to choose. And then more questions, up and down the whole chain attached to each area: going back to our access control example, first you will need to have considered how you expect sign-ups and registrations to work, and afterwards perhaps attendance tracking, reporting and — where relevant — the awarding of credits or certificates.
Obvious? Perhaps, but believe us, it is done less often than you would think, and few things are as capable of saving time and money while keeping requirements and expectations high.
2. How far can I customise the event management platform?
3. How scalable is this event software?
The third question to ask concerns the future you want to have with the event management software you are looking for. In most cases, when you go looking for a tool like this you are not doing it for a single occasion but to find a stable partner for a long-term relationship. Adopting any software will require a degree of organisational adjustment, the revision of some procedures and, however user-friendly it may be, time to get used to it, to make it your own and get the most from it. Then it will take time to customise it, to optimise it, to build the infrastructure on which the whole event will rest. More costs, then: energy and time on top of the cost of buying or renting the tool. Costs that will partly repay themselves from the very first use, since — if the choice was made carefully, with the questions above — from that moment on the organisation and management of the event will already have improved. But the investment really starts to compound when the preparatory work can be reused at future events and spread over a longer period.
More than that: when the software is able to grow as your event activity grows, as the number of events grows, as they get larger, as the ways of delivering content multiply (integrating offline and online, hybrid and in person, for example). That is when the value of the tool can become genuinely exponential.
Have you ever asked yourself these questions?
If you have already had one of our live demos, we have certainly asked you them.
But if you would like a hand finding the answers, request a live demo — we are always happy to talk.