18 Powerful Attendease Features That Make National and Regional Event Management.

Watching an event unfold successfully is a bit like taking in the performance of a world-class ballet or an elite-level gymnast. They make it look so easy that all you see is the polished final product – not the hours upon hours of practice that went into pulling off the illusion of effortlessness.

Managers in charge of national and regional events know that it takes blood, sweat and tears to get an event to go off without a hitch. And while there’s no way to fully eliminate the work required to produce a successful event, you can make things easier on yourself by choosing technology tools that allow you to automate repetitive or manual event management tasks.

An added bonus? You won’t just minimize frustration. You’ll also reduce costs – and improve overall event ROI – by simplifying your efforts and driving greater overall event efficiency. Here are 18 Attendease features that’ll make it possible to do just that:

Before the Event

Event success isn’t built off of final attendance numbers or total revenue generated alone. It’s generated at every step of the process along the way – including the actions you take days, weeks and months before your event opens its doors.

Take your event’s website. According to research by Event Manager Blog, event planners listed event websites and event registration sites as the third and fourth most effective tools, respectively, for event marketing (behind social media and email marketing). Anyone who’s ever struggled through a frustrating online event registration process intuitively understands how important these tools really are.

That said, building a great event website doesn’t have to mean learning code or handing over five figures to a web developer. Using Attendease’s Website Builder tool gives event managers access to these four features:  

• Pre-built templates, including options appropriate for webinars, conferences, product launches, retreats and more.
• An advanced publishing engine, which makes it possible to quickly build and publish highly-customized, branded event websites using Attendease’s drag-and-drop interface.
• Drag-and-drop widgets, such as our video widget, photo widget and content widgets, which allow you to tailor your event website to the specific format and needs of each event you run.
• Time-saving cloning capabilities, which allows you to clone an existing event website (including its forms, registration workflows, emails, sponsors and more), rather than building an entirely new one from scratch.

What you put on your website is just as critical as how you publish it, and that means bringing a level of thoughtfulness and sophistication to the way you organize your sessions. As Enterprise UX conference organizer Louis Rosenfield explains, “A conference program isn’t just a bunch of talks. It must also connect them, and sequence them so they build upon each other and create the momentum that drives the event forward.”

Attendease simplifies this process with the following features:

• Drag-and-drop session slotting, which provides a visual interface for organizing sessions (as well as reorganizing them in the inevitable case of speaker cancellations).
• Speaker workflows, which allow you to automate many of the manual aspects of speaker management (such as approving or rejecting applications to speak, requesting bio and session information and automatically updating your event website).

Finally, there’s attendance. According to Geoff Beers, writing for The Balance’s Small Business blog, “Attendance is the single most important factor to the success of your event. Good attendance numbers bring revenue and sponsorship opportunities. And the more people you have registered will create more demand for advertising and participation openings.”

Attendance isn’t something you can afford to leave up to chance by assuming an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. Ensuring people show up for your event begins by providing them with easy registration options – such as those enabled by Attendease’s registration form features:

• Conditional fields, which allow you to tailor registration workflows to highly specific registration scenarios on an attendee-by-attendee basis.
• Pricing tiers and promo codes, which grant you unlimited options for creating different price groups and passes, as well as the ability to offer discount codes to particular stakeholders or groups.
• Pass synchronization, which makes it possible to connect different registration forms to individual pass types in order to gather specific pieces of information for different event groups.

Event marketing factors heavily into attendance as well -– and it’s something that can be simplified with the following three Attendease features:

• Built-in email marketing capabilities, which allow you to send out custom one-on-one messages or reach entire groups of registrants at once.
• Automated push notifications sent through your Attendease event app in order to drum up excitement for your upcoming event.
• Google and Adobe Analytics integrations, so that you can analyze your event’s website traffic and make informed decisions into how and where to promote your event.

During the Event

“What session am I supposed to be in right now?”

“Which room is this panel being held in?”

Sound familiar? Anyone who managed events in the pre-digital era remembers the seemingly-never-ending series of questions posed by attendees – despite the number of print-outs or the amount of carefully-worded instructions issued by event managers.

Modern event technology has changed all of this. Although no app can completely cure attendee confusion, the features offered by Attendease – including the three described below – can take a significant chunk out of the effort required for event execution.

• Member profiles, which let your visitors create their own profiles and accounts to improve their on-site experience.
• Personalized agendas, so that attendees can both choose the sessions they care most about, and view their selections on their mobile devices while at the event.
• Automatic waitlisting, through which Attendease can auto-manage session capacities and provide attendees with real-time registration updates.

Having these types of tools at your disposal doesn’t just minimize the headaches associated with answering the same questions over and over again. It can actually save you money if fewer people are needed to staff the event in order to field attendee queries.

After the Event

The potential impact of event management technology doesn’t stop once your doors are closed. The analytics data these tools provide plays an important role in your post-event post-mortem analysis process.

Christy Lamagna, founder and Master Strategist at Strategic Meetings & Events, explains, “A post-mortem is a formal meeting that walks through and assesses all major aspects of the program. It evaluates what worked, what didn’t and what should be improved or remembered or done differently the next time. My team conducts an internal post-mortem to measure our processes and performance and to critique every event.”

To execute something similar at your organization, you’ll need the numbers provided by the following Attendease features:

• Registration tracking, so that you can measure the number of passes sold out of each type or pricing tier you offered, as well as track the number of no-show attendees after the event.
• Revenue tracking, which allows you to track not only overall event revenue, but segment it by business unit as well.
• Surveys, which can be used to gather qualitative data on attendee experiences through the form fields you create.

Choosing an Event Management Technology

Thanks to event management technology tools like Attendease, there’s no reason to suffer through the manual tasks associated with running a national or regional event ever again. That said, it’s important to ask yourself a number of different questions when evaluating possible event management solutions:

• Does the technology support all stages of event execution, or is it specialized on a particular task? Your event tech needs may be limited to a single task, in which case choosing a tool with a more limited scope may make sense. But if you need support at all stages of complex events, choosing a tool that offers beginning-to-end functionality minimizes the hassle of trying to get multiple systems to play nice together.
• Does the technology integrate with tools I’m already using? If you’re already using popular platforms like Google Analytics, Salesforce, Hubspot or Slack, look for event management technologies that integrate with these systems to avoid duplicating effort unnecessarily.
• Is the technology mobile-responsive or does it have an attendee app? Event Manager Blog data suggests that “46% of event planners use event apps in their events, while 26% are considering using them.” Simply put, event apps are quickly becoming an expectation by attendees at major events. If you’re considering event management technology for agenda management or on-site information purposes, make sure it has either an app or mobile-responsive component that attendees will be able to access from their devices while at the event.

For Attendease’s answers to these questions – or to learn more about other features offered by our comprehensive event management and automation platform – download our free Platform Overview guide or reach out to our team to book a free demo. We can’t wait to show you how easy it can be to manage national and regional events with Attendease.