Using the right event management platform from the start is critical for the success of your conference. Choosing the wrong platform can lead to unnecessary challenges, from poor attendee satisfaction to increased workloads for organizers.
To help you avoid these pitfalls, this blog will explore the features you need from any system, highlighting the features you should prioritize before opening event registration.
With the right platform, you can streamline your planning process and ensure a seamless experience for both you and your attendees.
We’ve supported over 10,000 attendees in enjoying events worldwide. As experienced event organizers ourselves, we understand firsthand the challenges and requirements of event management software from every angle, whether as organizers, attendees, speakers, or exhibitors.
The most crucial aspect of event management is creating an experience where attendees can easily access the information they need. This isn’t limited to your event homepage, it encompasses all the details they require to make an informed decision to register and attend your event.
Key information attendees look for includes:
Providing this information clearly and conveniently is essential for boosting your event’s appeal and turnout.
When selecting an event management platform, prioritizing ease of use and attendee experience is vital. Many event organizers make the mistake of focusing solely on software features, but let me be clear: the user experience always outweighs feature lists.
Choosing a tool that excels in one area, like event scheduling, but lacks other critical features can complicate the planning process and disrupt the attendee journey. A seamless experience, both for attendees and organizers is key.
Inconsistent designs, mismatched branding, confusing journeys, and multiple logins create a disjointed experience that frustrates attendees and impacts event turnout.
Additionally, relying on separate tools to address individual event management needs increases the complexity of integration, data synchronization, and overall costs.
By choosing an event platform that balances functionality with user-friendliness, you can reduce inefficiencies and ensure a seamless, enjoyable experience for your attendees.
Making the right decision on which event management platform to use comes down to two key factors: your desired features and your available budget. Unfortunately, these two often don’t align perfectly.
In most cases, your budget will dictate your software choice, which may leave gaps in your event management toolkit.
This forces you to find workarounds or additional tools, which can result in an inefficient system. Instead of delivering a seamless experience, both you and your attendees may face disruptions.
A platform meant to save you time can instead consume it, diverting your attention from other crucial tasks.
Selecting an event management platform that offers a balance of essential features (and maybe a few “nice-to-haves”) within your budget is far more valuable than choosing a solution that excels at one feature but falls short on others.
A comprehensive, user-friendly solution ensures a smoother experience for both organizers and attendees.
The cost of event software depends on the features you need and the size of your event. On average, event organizers with 1,000 attendees or fewer typically budget between $5,000 and $20,000 for their software.
For example, a platform for 500 attendees might cost $3,750 when you use our platform, while competitors like Sched can charge up to $9,000 plus ticket transaction fees.
Some providers, such as Whova and Cvent, don’t publish their pricing upfront. Instead, they require lengthy sales processes, only to reveal pricing that may exceed your budget. Large-scale event software solutions can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so it’s essential to explore your options carefully.
When assessing whether an event management platform is worth the investment, consider the following questions:
If any of these questions raise concerns, the platform you’re considering might not be the best fit for your event.
Finding the right event management platform requires balancing your budget with the features your event truly needs.
Always focus on solutions that deliver value to both you and your attendees, ensuring a smooth planning process and an excellent event experience.
A clear understanding of your goals and careful evaluation of potential platforms can save you from wasting time, money, and effort.
Choosing an event platform that is both technically reliable and backed by excellent support is absolutely critical.
When your event technology fails at a crucial moment and you can’t reach your supplier’s support team, it can spell disaster for your event.
At Event Tech Live London in November 2024, we attended a session hosted by one of our competitors.
During the Q&A, an audience member posed a vital question: “If your company is so big, how do you ensure you support your customers?”
Their response? “Well, you get assigned an account manager.”
This answer highlights a major red flag. Relying on an account manager as your only point of contact is a recipe for slow, inefficient, and frustrating support, precisely when you need help the most.
Event organizers need direct, immediate access to expert support, especially during live events.
That’s why we do things differently. Our customers have the direct phone numbers of our engineers during their events.
No email triage systems, no lengthy queues, and no middlemen slowing down your request. Instead, you can quickly speak to the person who can actually resolve your issue.
We take this approach because we’re event organizers ourselves. We understand the stress of live events and the importance of having reliable support.
With us, there are no “what ifs” to worry about, just peace of mind that we’ll be there when you need us most.
There are 5 fundamental features you’ll need from any event management platform.
Depending on your event format, you may also need the following features:
If you’re organizing a conference or exhibition, the event registration features you require will be vastly different from those needed for a small gathering or corporate meeting.
For multi-day events, you may want to offer a variety of ticket options, such as single-day tickets and full-event passes. Additionally, exclusive VIP tickets for special events or experiences at your conference might be a desirable feature for your attendees.
Attendee registration behavior also plays a significant role in shaping the ticketing system features you’ll need. For instance, most attendees tend to register within two weeks of the event, which can be stressful for organizers. To encourage earlier sign-ups, consider offering discounts for early registration or loyalty incentives to past attendees.
If your event is a trade show aimed at business professionals, you might encounter requests for group ticket purchases. Companies often want to register multiple team members, with their finance departments managing the purchase. In such cases, offering group discounts can make your event more attractive to these businesses.
Regardless of who registers, you’ll need to collect critical attendee information using customizable registration forms. These forms allow you to profile your audience, giving you the insights needed to tailor your event to their preferences and needs.
If your event requires paid tickets, having a payment gateway is essential. Many all-in-one event management platforms include payment processing as part of their features, but often this comes with hidden costs.
These platforms typically charge 1.5% to 8% per ticket in fees, plus a fixed commission (usually $0.60 to $1 per ticket). Worse still, they often delay revenue payouts, holding 20% to 40% of your earnings until after the event concludes, with payouts occurring only every two weeks.
Some organizers accept these conditions for the convenience of using the platform’s built-in payment gateway. However, there’s a better way to retain more revenue from your ticket sales.
Signing up for Stripe, a widely trusted and cost-effective payment gateway is a simple way to maximize your profit per ticket. Stripe offers:
When you use our event management platform, you’re free to integrate your own Stripe payment gateway to process ticket payments. Unlike other platforms, we don’t charge any commissions or additional surcharges. This ensures you keep more of your revenue while enjoying faster, more reliable access to your ticket sales income.
By choosing a platform that prioritizes flexibility and fairness, you can focus on delivering a seamless experience for your attendees without compromising your bottom line.
Scheduling content for your event agenda is one of the most important yet time-consuming tasks you’ll face as an event organizer. And there’s no denying why, it’s essential because your session content is one of your most valuable assets and the primary reason attendees choose to register for your event.
At our events, over 60% of attendees report that the content sessions are their main motivation for attending.
Crafting a well-balanced agenda that appeals to your diverse attendee profiles is critical to ensuring your event’s success. However, creating a seamless schedule requires powerful tools that align with your event’s unique needs.
Before selecting features for your event scheduling platform, think about how and where your sessions will be delivered:
Each delivery format introduces its own limitations, such as physical room capacity for in-person events or streaming bandwidth for virtual sessions. The right scheduling software must account for these restrictions and provide tools to manage them efficiently.
For example, with our platform, you can set maximum seating capacities for in-person or virtual rooms. When attendees reserve their seats, our system tracks these reservations in real-time, notifying you if room limits are about to be reached. This allows you to act proactively and avoid logistical issues.
Attendees often face the challenge of navigating busy event agendas. That’s why it’s crucial to segment your sessions by topic, delivery type (in-person, online, on-demand), and attendee interest. Your scheduling tool should categorize sessions clearly, enabling attendees to filter sessions and create personalized agendas based on their preferences.
Attendees also need an easy way to follow their customized agendas during the event. While many organizers believe a mobile app is essential for this, our data shows that 78% of attendees prefer using the event website over downloading an app.
Therefore, it’s critical that your event platform is fully responsive across desktop and mobile devices, offering a seamless experience regardless of how attendees choose to engage.
For organizers, a drag-and-drop visual calendar is indispensable. This feature allows you to map out sessions across event dates and rooms more effectively than a traditional list view, especially when managing concurrent sessions.
Color-coding sessions by category can also help avoid scheduling conflicts and ensure your attendees aren’t forced to choose between equally valuable sessions.
Efficient content management is another must-have feature. For large conferences with hundreds of sessions and speakers, managing updates manually can quickly become overwhelming. That’s why delegation is essential.
With our platform, you can delegate session content management to speakers or exhibitors. They can update their abstracts or upload presentations without changing critical details like session titles, duration, or schedules.
Our platform even allows you to approve changes before they’re published, giving you full control while sharing the workload.
Managing speakers effectively is another reason why an all-in-one event platform makes sense. Your speakers are also attendees, and requiring them to register on separate platforms to manage their session profiles, complete registration, or update content is frustrating and inefficient.
At some events we’ve spoken at, we’ve had to submit profiles across multiple systems, an exhausting and unnecessary burden. Instead, a streamlined platform ensures a seamless onboarding process for speakers.
For example, with our event platform, speakers receive an email link guiding them through the following:
This process eliminates the need for multiple systems, ensuring speakers and organizers save time and avoid unnecessary complexity.
Efficient scheduling tools not only help you build a robust agenda but also enhance the overall attendee experience, making it easier for them to navigate sessions and engage with your event.
By choosing a platform that integrates scheduling, registration, and speaker management seamlessly, you can eliminate inefficiencies and focus on delivering a successful event.
With our event platform, you can streamline the entire scheduling process, reduce workload, and ensure your attendees and speakers enjoy a frictionless experience from start to finish.
Having a dedicated mobile app for attendees is a must-have feature in your event management toolkit. It provides attendees with quick and convenient access to essential information like their tickets, session agendas, and event details, enhancing their overall experience.
This means they won’t need to waste time searching through emails or remembering login details for various platforms.
However, it’s crucial to choose the right mobile app features. An overloaded app or one with features you’re not equipped to manage can lead to disengagement, causing attendees to uninstall the app. This is particularly disappointing if you’ve invested money in it!
Here are six mobile app features attendees love:
And here are six features attendees universally dislike:
If you plan to use push notifications, reserve them for important announcements like upcoming sessions on personal agendas or significant conference-wide updates (e.g., “Lunch is delayed by 15 minutes due to a technical issue”) and avoid promotional messages.
When implementing social networking features, be prepared to invest in moderation, marketing, and structured management to encourage adoption. Without adequate support, these features can become chaotic, leading to spam, noise, and potential abuse, defeating the purpose of the event app.
With our app, included in the event platform price, you can offer your attendees everything they love and avoid the features they hate.
Traditionally, event organizers and platforms have overlooked the advantages of integrating badge printing with their event management software, often relying on a separate system and supplier for this critical service.
Many event platforms claim to include badge printing, but often this means they provide a web interface for designing badges, leaving you to source the necessary equipment and software.
When you explore external badge printing options, you may find their systems incompatible with your design files, requiring them to recreate the designs.
Numerous specialist badge printing companies offer software that can directly or indirectly integrate with many event platforms through APIs or third-party gateways like Zapier. This integration allows them to poll your registration tickets, validate them, and print attendee badges onsite while still supporting onsite registration.
However, this service comes with additional costs on top of your event management software fees. Specialist badge printing companies charge anywhere from $4,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on your event size. If you haven’t accounted for this in your budget, it can be a significant problem.
Fortunately, there are solutions available. Our event management platform includes dedicated event check-in and badge printing software that can be installed on any Windows device. Connect a printer, load your badge labels, and you can manage onsite badge printing at no extra charge.
This doesn’t mean compromising on quality or flexibility. You can design your own badges, create different designs for various attendee roles, and even use double-sided printing with alternate designs on each side.
Using our check-in kiosk, all badge prints and attendance are recorded in our system, providing a single place to view all event reports, including attendance statistics.
It’s also user-friendly, eliminating concerns about integrations and potential issues. Attendees can register at your event and have their badges printed automatically in just 30 seconds.
If you prefer not to handle this yourself or purchase the hardware, we offer rental and managed services for badge printing at very affordable prices.
When selecting an event platform for managing your conference, it’s crucial to consider the analytics it offers. Analytics help you prepare, adapt, and evaluate your event effectively.
Analytics that help you prepare:
Analytics that help you adapt:
Analytics that help you evaluate:
These are just a few of the essential analytics needed by event organizers. While using multiple management tools can provide these insights, it often requires extracting raw data and cross-referencing in Excel or another reporting tool.
Our all-in-one event management platform offers real-time access to these reports and more, allowing you to instantly understand your event’s performance and effectiveness without the need for manual data crunching.
Although I’ve explained in detail the main features you’ll need in an event platform depending on your event type and goals.
If you have exhibitors or sponsors at your event, you’ll need an efficient way to onboard them, showcase them to attendees via your event website and mobile app, assist them in registering their staff, and provide additional instructions and information.
How we help: Our event platform streamlines this process by allowing you to onboard exhibitors, automatically assign them benefits, set tasks for them to complete, and delegate their event page administration and staff registration to their nominated admins. This frees up your time to focus on other important aspects of your event.
Effective event communication is crucial. You need to guide your contact base to your event and encourage registration. Once they’ve registered, sending them tailored communications related to their participation is essential.
It’s important to avoid sending incorrect information to the wrong type of attendee, as this can cause confusion, dissatisfaction, and potentially result in lost registrations.
While you could use marketing email platforms like MailChimp, Brevo, or Campaign Monitor for this task, they come with additional costs. Furthermore, you’ll need to ensure integration between these platforms and your event management software to automatically add new registrants to your mailing list with the appropriate tags, ensuring they receive the necessary communications.
How we help: To streamline your event communications, our platform includes a built-in contacts management solution. This feature provides similar functionality to email marketing software, allowing you to import contacts, segment them, create email lists, and send tailored campaigns.
This integration ensures that all your communication needs are met without the extra costs and complexities of using third-party email marketing platforms.
If you source your session content from your industry community, you’ll need an efficient way to advertise, collect, evaluate, and approve these submissions. A call for content platform, like Sessionize, is often used for this purpose.
When selecting a call for content platform, it’s essential to ensure it provides governance around your submission criteria. This includes conditions that speakers must agree to, such as covering their travel expenses, the specific content topics you’re seeking, and submission limits, like the maximum number of session proposals and the number of co-speakers per session.
As an organizer, you must be able to evaluate session proposals and determine their suitability. You’ll need a system to shortlist, approve, and reject sessions on schedule, and convert approved submissions into sessions on your event agenda.
Furthermore, you’ll need to onboard the successful speakers onto your event management platform, register them for a ticket, and ensure they complete their speaker profile. This will ensure they are properly represented across your event website and mobile app.
How we help: Our event platform features a built-in call for content tool that simplifies the entire process. It allows you to seamlessly advertise, collect, evaluate, and approve session proposals. Our unique auto-scheduling rules ensure that approved content is scheduled into the right room at the right time, based on the session being approved. This feature saves you considerable time when creating your agenda.
Additionally, our pricing model is based on the total number of registered participants, and we offer 50 free registrations per event. This means you can manage your entire call for content program without incurring any extra costs, as only approved speakers count toward your registration plan limit. This unbeatable value sets us apart from our competitors.
If your event includes exhibitors, they will want to engage with attendees and generate business leads. Typically, organizers might choose an event scanning app like Entegy or Swapcard. They would import attendee data into these apps and integrate them with QR codes on attendees’ printed badges.
This process involves a three-way integration between your event ticketing software, badge printing software, and lead scanning app, ensuring all systems are kept up to date and accurate.
Within the lead scanning software, exhibitors will need to register app users and add their own post-lead capture questions to enrich their results and tailor follow-up journeys to specific interests.
Many lead scanning apps charge per exhibitor user, with typical prices ranging from $50 to $100 per user. While you can offset some of these costs by requiring exhibitors to pay for licenses, they will usually expect at least one license to be included in their package.
How we help: Our mobile app is included in our event management platform at no extra cost. It is free to download, and you can control access to lead scanning by setting the maximum number of staff each exhibitor can register for the event. All exhibitor staff have access to badge scanning capabilities. If you choose to upsell this feature to exhibitors, you can do so without any additional charges from us.
We also allow exhibitors to create their custom post-lead capture surveys, which their teams can design and manage. All leads are accessible and exportable via our event management system.
Since you’re using our integrated registration, badge printing, and lead capture solution, there are no integration issues to worry about. The entire process is seamless and hassle-free.
On average, 42% of attendees don’t pre-plan their attendance or session content. Instead, they decide which sessions to attend once they’re at the event.
As a result, they are likely to ignore your emails, forget their ticket, and have trouble finding your event website or mobile app. They might also be stressed from travel and dealing with sensory overload, making it difficult for them to access the online agenda.
Even now, in 2025, attendees still request printed agendas upon arrival.
To assist these individuals, it’s important to prominently display your event schedule at the venue. This can be done on the exhibition floor, in the lobby, and outside each session room, allowing attendees to easily browse the content that interests them.
While printed agendas are useful, they become outdated when changes are made after printing. Therefore, digital agenda wallboards displayed on venue digital signage are preferred. This approach allows for real-time updates and ensures attendees have the most current information.
How we help: Our event management system includes built-in room and event-wide wallboards that are dynamically generated on fixed URLs, enabling display on venue digital signage systems that support webpages. Room-based wallboards show what’s currently happening and what’s scheduled next in that room, along with branded sponsorship options. Our event wallboards display the current and upcoming sessions across all rooms at your event.
These wallboards operate in real-time, ensuring any last-minute schedule changes are reflected across your event website, mobile app, and digital agenda screens.
We also offer a unique feature that allows you to delay all remaining sessions of the day by up to an hour in case of an unplanned emergency, like a venue evacuation. This feature has been invaluable to us on two occasions.
Additionally, you can generate a PDF agenda directly from the event website to print onsite for any attendee who prefers a physical copy. This ensures that printed agendas are up-to-date and avoids the issue of outdated paper copies printed weeks before the event.
Providing attendee support is crucial for overall satisfaction. Handling first-line queries via email often involves repeating the same information multiple times.
However, this no longer needs to be the case. With event-aware artificial intelligence, a web chatbot can answer attendee questions using knowledge you provide about your event.
This alleviates much of the repetitive email and phone call traffic. However, this feature is only useful if you can effectively train your AI bot about your event. Training requires data, time, and patience, which you may not have, potentially rendering the feature less effective.
With our AI chatbot, Jeronimo, all these concerns are alleviated. Jeronimo is integrated into our event platform graph and automatically learns about your event from the information you naturally input into our system. Details like sessions, speakers, exhibitors, travel information, opening times, build manuals, venue information, and more.
When an attendee wants to know where they can charge their electric vehicle, Jeronimo can answer them. If they want to ask which sessions suit their profile, Jeronimo can suggest relevant sessions. When they want to know which sessions their favorite speaker is presenting, Jeronimo has the answer. If they are looking for exhibitors to address a specific problem, Jeronimo can guide them.
Jeronimo is also knowledgeable about our system. He’s connected to our knowledge base, so whether it’s you as the organizer, or your attendees, exhibitors, and speakers, anyone can ask him a question about using our system and he will provide the answer.
While Jeronimo is hardworking, he is also backed by real human support. If he can’t answer a question, he will transfer it to our support team, who will then assist you. This support extends to your attendees as well. If anyone has questions about using our event platform, we handle it, saving you time from doing our support work for us.
All of our competitors in the event management software industry are pay to play. Very few will offer you a free trial. Most will require you to hand over money to access leaving you to base your whole event planning software choice on one well rehearsed demo.
We don’t want you to feel locked in or forced to make a decision within 30-minutes of talking to a salesperson. We also recognize that some event organizers may not have access to the funds needed to buy into their event technology toolset at the time they need it.
We don’t do free trials, we do something more extraordinary. We give you free access to our event management platform for your first 50 registrations. You get access to every feature for as long as you remain under the 50 limit. Only if you exceed this are you required to upgrade to a paid plan.
This industry unique offering allows you to get planning and managing your event using a platform that’s designed to be seamless to provide the ultimate event experience for your attendees, speaker, exhibitors, and of course, you.
Why not book your demo meeting with us today?
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