Top 10 Tech Tools Event Planners Can’t Ignore

Make some room on your iPads and smartphones, ladies and gentlemen! You’ll want to download these 10 apps and tech tools to help you plan your next event.

Oh and the best part? You don’t even have to be a techie to use them!

#1 Asana

Asana is the 'organize anything' tool with a simple interface that makes teamwork easy… all for free! Manage multiple projects, to-do lists, assign tasks and due dates to team mates, and discuss ongoing projects with your team. It can be colour coded and you can enable 'celebrations' so there is a brightly coloured unicorn that flies across your screen once you complete a task! We are extremely motivated by this fun feature. Asana is a necessity for the hyper-organized event coordinator and team player.

#2 Squarespace

With Squarespace, you don’t have to be a designer to create a functional and attractive event website. It is an easy-to-learn, user friendly tool that can get your new event webpage up and running within minutes (okay, maybe 15-20 minutes if you’re customizing a template from scratch!) You can also purchase your domain name in this one stop shop. Use the blogging tool to share your content quickly and easily and add all your social handles to attract more followers. At approximately $18USD per year for a website and domain, it’s a great deal!  

#3 Eventbrite

Eventbrite delivers one of the best event experiences for BOTH the attendee buying a ticket and the organizer managing registration. Eventbrite has updated and improved its event page design to make it even easier to create an attractive and professional event page. (Only downside is that you can’t easily format your event copy without some HTML and CSS ... But that’s hopefully going to be updated soon.) On the back end, you can create promo codes to share with VIPs, offer multiple ticket types, download attendee stats, and more! Use the mobile app on the day of the event to check-in attendees and track how many have arrived.

#4 Google Drive

What would we do without Google Drive? Google Docs and Sheets (Google’s version of Microsoft Excel) allow us to access planning documents anytime, anywhere. It makes collaboration easy by allowing multiple people to work simultaneously. Create and distribute feedback surveys or application forms using Google Forms. Submitted form data is sent directly to your Google account and it even puts it into a beautiful report format for you to read. No more annoying attachments or creating charts from scratch!

#5 Canva

Canva is a free, online design tool that we use to create custom content. From social media images, to posters, to event programs, Canva lets you step into a designer’s shoes quickly and easily without the complicated software. Want to be a considered a live tweeting genius? Download the iPhone app, take a photo, add your logo and publish branded images and content to share live during your event!

#6 Mailchimp

Mailchimp helps you to build and manage your email lists for free, up to 2,000 subscribers. Tracking opens and clicks can prepare you for how informed your attendees will be and can help you know when to change up your email strategy. Mailchimp ranks your most successful campaigns so you can see what works and what doesn’t! You can also personalize emails and subject lines to make your emails as friendly as possible.

#7 Streak for Gmail

Want to make your emails even more personalized? Dodge the spam folder with Streak, an app for Gmail users that lets you use personalized mail merge tags and send emails 1:1 instead of having to ‘bcc’ groups. This is a great way to email a group of speakers or sponsors. Expect an increase in responses!

" Streak has saved me hours of emailing and has increased response rates tenfold!"  - one of our clients and a brand new Streak user

#8 Buffer

Buffer is your ultimate time saving tool that keeps your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram profiles filled with content. Don’t have time to post ad hoc? Schedule a week or more worth of posts on Buffer to save yourself some stress! Step it up a notch and download the Buffer add-on for Chrome to easily schedule retweets when you’re browsing the Internet. The analytics feature also tracks your top tweets.

#9 Spotify

Spotify gives you access to tons of readymade playlists! Don’t waste time worrying about your event tunes. Pick a playlist based on the mood you want to create for your event. Just be mindful that ads will play if you are using the free version so you’ll want to upgrade to the premium account for about ~$9CAD per month.

#10 Square

Square is a mobile payment processing and online invoicing tool. Using the square card reader, you can take credit card payments onsite and issue receipts for all purchases (including cash). Why limit ticket sales at the door or fundraising efforts? If your attendees prefer to be invoiced, you can do so (and collect payment) through Square. Events are about flexibility!

These are the tools we use to plan conferences and special events. What tools do you use?

The Do's and Don'ts of Using Conference Apps

Originally written by Jenn Egroff on behalf of the Cloud Factory Conference Organizers for the Bizzabo blog on April 15, 2014.

Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO speaking at The Cloud Factory

When Boast Capital and the Canadian Cloud Council set out to find a mobile app for The Cloud Factory conference, we were simply looking for an engagement tool. Something that would help our attendees make connections and follow the conference agenda. That’s it. But when we discovered Bizzabo, we soon realized it met all of our needs and more!

The Cloud Factory conference brought together 550 of the brightest executives, entrepreneurs and investors in cloud computing technology on April 7 & 8, 2014. The conference was hosted at the Banff Centre, a beautiful arts and leader innovation campus located on the side of a mountain in the rockies resort town of Banff, Alberta, Canada.

Out of the 550 conference attendees, 350 joined the community and 157 opted to check-in. According to our analytics page, we were impressed to discover that our attendees had exchanged over 1,350 messages to one another and had sent 257 LinkedIn connections. They used the app to keep track of leads (799, to be exact) and viewed others’ pages 2,665 times. We call that success!

Based on our experience, here are our mobile app ‘do’s and don’ts’ for conference organizers:

Conference Apps Do’s:

Beyond the obvious advice to fill in as much information into the app as you possibly can (sessions, speakers, sponsors, etc), here are some additional do’s:

• Update your schedule as it changes (it somehow always does!) - this was very easy on our end and our attendees really appreciated it.
• Take advantage of real-time announcements - this was very helpful for giving directions and reminding attendees to visit our Sponsor Lounge. We scripted everything in advance so we knew how many announcements we needed and how many we would have as backup to announce schedule changes. Preparing crafted messages worked well and didn’t require as much time/effort on the spot! (keep in mind, you can’t schedule messages in the system. You still have to copy and paste the messages and press send).
• Publish signage with URLs, QR codes and be sure to tweet the mobile app download link - this may seem excessive, but everyone accesses this information differently and its better to over-communicate this info to encourage engagement.
• Use interactive polls - we used this new feature to help us judge our Cloud Startup Showdown pitch competition. 175 audience members participated and counted for 50% of the final award (alongside our VCs input, of course)

Conference App Don’ts:

• This is a bold statement, but there is no need for paper schedules - we decided to save paper (and time) and rely on our Bizzabo app. Our program changed daily (don’t you love it when speakers cancel last minute?) and we could easily communicate those updates on our mobile agenda and website. Some attendees still prefer paper and will ask for it, but its time to change past behaviours and move to the cloud. (They throw out the paper agenda after anyway!)
• Forget to sync the website and mobile app - we fell into this trap. When there were last minute changes, we forgot to update both our mobile app and the website simultaneously. Not everyone will use the app (unfortunately), so make sure you still update your website too. 
• Forget to announce your custom community code- we decided to keep our community private to attendees only and sometimes the attendees would register for the app with a different email address than they had registered for the conference with. Since this information wasn’t always consistent, its best to remind them about the special code so that they will always be able to access the app.
• Assume people will download the app when they register for the conference - most people didn’t download or join our community until a day before the conference (we understand that they are very busy folks!). Make sure you have lots of on-site promotional material so that your attendees can easily download the app and join the community on the spot.

If you have any other do’s and don’ts that you’d like to add, please share them with us below.