Whether it’s about small get-togethers or major public festivals, all events require a lot work – and are often quite stressful to organize. Luckily, there are ways to make it easier. Various tools and automations ensure that you as an organizer don’t have to remember everything. In this post we share our best tips on how to automate and schedule event management, hoping to make your life a bit easier.
Traditionally event management includes…
- Event marketing
- Invitations
- Collecting registrations
- Collecting possible payments
- Event communications
- Feedback surveys
At best, events are a great part of your marketing strategy. Still, you shouldn’t let them take too much of your energy and efficient working hours: by automating the right operations you can make the organizers’ job much easier, minimize humane mistakes and save time for other important tasks.
Here are five steps on how to make your event management easier, and how Eventilla can help you with them.
Automating invitations and reminders
Depending on the event’s nature, you should send the invitations at least two weeks before the big day – sometimes even months before. Especially in these cases, it is also important to remind the participant that the event is getting closer. Fortunately, scheduling messages beforehand is very easy these days.
With Eventilla, you can automate sending the invitations. In addition, you can automate reminders for those who haven’t registered a certain time before the event. To those who have registered, you can automate reminders of the event, for example a few days or hours before it. In Eventilla you can easily target and automate communications based on the participation info, like webinar check-ins or ticket QR-code scans.
Collecting registrations and payments online
We just can’t emphasize this enough: do not bother to collect the registrants’ names via email or telephone, or save them to a complex Excel file. That craves way too much extra work and energy, and there is too much room for errors (yes, we’ve all been there). Instead, create an event page where the participants can easily register and provide exactly the information you need. Be creative with the registration form fields and really consider all the information you need to collect. Does the catering want to know special diets beforehand? Should you be prepared to offer a certain number of transportation options?
We really recommend automating even the registration payment process. Eventilla offers an event page, registration form, payment processes and easy participant reports. Reports are automatically updated in real-time in an URL address, and can be exported as Excel files.
Here you can see an example of Eventilla’s own event page and automated messaging after the registration.
Automating communications
Event communications are an important part of the arrangements. The needed communications and informing depends greatly on the event style, but as a general rule it can be said that the participants want to hear from you at least before and after the event.
Automate event messaging both before and after the event. With Eventilla you can message the participants via email or SMS. You can also target different kind of communications based on the participation info – for example the feedback survey can be sent only to those who were present at the event.
Event communication automation examples:
- Registration confirmation after registering
- Reminder message a week before the event
- SMS message about possible program changes during the event day
- Arrival instructions a day before
- Thank you message after the event
- “Did you forget something?” to remind about the lost and found items pickup.
Sharing and anonymizing event reports
Especially when there are many organizers involved, participant data can have various use cases. Catering might need to know the special diets, hotel on the other hand wonders how many people will need accommodation. That is why we recommend to develop and automate different kinds of reports. Eventilla’s reporting tool segments different data into one report, which can be protected with a password.
Automatically created reports can be sent forward and the data gathered together, and you don’t need to collect information from different Excel files or from different persons.
According to GDPR, it is important to anonymize the unnecessary data at the right time. Anonymizing reports or deleting the data can be scheduled in Eventilla. Another thing less to remember during the event hassle!
Scheduling feedback surveys
Create a feedback survey beforehand and schedule sending it after the event. This way you don’t forget to ask for feedback and the participants still have their experience fresh in mind, when you ask for development ideas. In Eventilla you can also define that the feedback survey will only be sent to those who actually were present at the event.
+ A tip: Duplicating events
So you’ve created an excellent event, messaging and feedback surveys? There’s no need to do it twice! With Eventilla you can copy and duplicate an event with all settings and scheduling, just for a different time period. Just publish, and you’re ready to go!
