Event Essentials

Event Essentials is great for small businesses

Opmerkingen: I have really enjoyed working with Event Essentials. They have taken the time to get to know our needs and modified their based products to develop a custom solution that meets our needs. They are

Pluspunten:

The main thing I love about this product is how it can be, and has been, customized to meet our needs. I love the ability to automatically have vendor bios (business name, contact information, description of services and products, and a photo) to be automatically posted to a web page once we approve the vendor. I really like the easy to use interface to view and manage vendors. I can quickly find vendors, view their status, make changes and approve or reject them. Our vendors love the "Returning Exhibitor" feature that allows the vendor to submit an application using most of the data they entered on their prior application. This saves them a lot of time.

Minpunten:

The system does not (currently) allow vendors to make changes to content. This requires us to make changes on their behalf. Fortunately, this is not difficult to do.

Customizing a flexible event management platform

Opmerkingen: Our experience has been very good. Custom configuring a management system like ours is not for the feint of heart. Nor does it happen overnight. I think the EE team underestimated the complexity of our business process. We worked through that. I think a stronger guiding hand from EE's project manager would have helped us better organize ourselves. However, I commend their dedication and follow through because in the end, we have what we envisioned.

Pluspunten:

Event Essentials enabled us to take an existing event management platform and configure it to our specific and quite unique needs. The flexibility of their platform is amazing. The EE team configured the system to accommodate our workflow. No more work-arounds. And that is a huge plus. The other farmers market management platforms were not able to be as responsive to customization. Interface is important to me and Event Essentials is quite good. Search and filtering are robust and snappy making it easy to view data as desired. Organizing content under a tab system is very helpful and essentially provides pre-filtered data sets. They have a robust Portal allowing our market vendors to access their accounts, view their applications, their registrations, email history and soon, invoices and payments. Vendors may initiate changes through their portal. And, the system has customized email notification that are associated with specific actions confirming status to vendors and notifying our staff action is required. We develop and manages about 15 seasonal farmers markets. We needed to integrate our management system tying together the two primary functional areas of our company -- Vendor sales & management and Market Operations management. We deal with a large amount of data and lots of moving parts. We needed to integrate a robust daily market reporting system. We needed a robust reporting system with great filters. Event Essentials is doing this for us

Minpunten:

There a couple of things that could be better. We do a fair amount of data entry in the field and the display on smaller screens, i.e. iPad Mini's needs some attention. I suspect the EE team will work this out at some point. It is important to us to be able to self manage some back end features. Currently they are giving us that ability incrementally which is probably a good thing. It would be helpful to be able to create report templates, update more text areas, ourselves. That too, I think come in time.

Horrible experience; I could never recommend this.

Pluspunten:

They only good thing about Event Essentials was the price; they were very affordable and during the sales process, it was easy to communicate with the sales managers.

Minpunten:

Literally everything else. When we signed our contract, we had a very long list of things that we were told would be able to be implemented and customized. As soon as we signed on, everything went dark as far as communication went. We went multiple weeks without updates, sometimes months. While things were made and created, almost nothing worked as we expected it to. We were told that it was because "we were on the old system" but never offered a chance to upgrade to a new system. Critical updates and deadlines were missed frequently by our account representatives to the point that we had to move to an entirely different event management company because the system was not functional for us. Truly a disappointment, because Event Essentials had such great potential; they overpromised and vastly underdelivered.

Event Essentials is THE multi-purpose tool you never knew you needed to have in your event arsenal!

Opmerkingen: EE is extremely user friendly and intuitive. Without any training whatsoever, I got thrown into EE and surprisingly, navigation was easy and adding information, exporting data, reports, etc. was straightforward and uncomplicated. Considering the sheer size of data over a multitude of areas, it is amazing how simple their program is to use. Besides all that EE has to offer and how they truly work with clients as a team, I have been impressed with their ability to pivot during Covid-19. In the event industry, social distancing is an obvious issue (among many) so we have been continually changing policies, adding new information, etc. and EE has not only responded swiftly in implementing our changes but were crucial in our decision making as well. They were also able to offer extremely helpful advice as well as create new opportunities when the world went on lock down. Overall, EE has been a game changer by creating our different types of computer programs designed to perform specific tasks in a variety of areas. Each with different principle goals that we required our programs to achieve. We are continually impressed with EE’s quality and professionalism and are very happy with their product and customer service. Give them a try and add them as a supplement to your team. You’ll be surprised how much your efficiency will soar while reducing stress. And you will not be disappointed.

Pluspunten:

We use EE as our platform for our festival (two-day event w/200,000 + attendees) and it manages three important yet completely different areas for us: volunteers, vendors and our parade. With over 564 shifts in 120 different positions, we rely on EE to manage the 350+ volunteers for our event with additional management of other smaller events associated with our festival offsite and/or before the festival (i.e. Golf Tournament, stages, etc.). In our vendor program, we handle roughly 577 vendors of various types such as Arts & Crafts, food, sponsors, non-profits, etc. EE works with us in creating and implementing all 7 of our vendor applications as well as manages all the information as a result. As for our parade, we average around 75 different entrants ranging from bands and floats to horses and VIPs. It is a varied yet entertaining parade and having EE keep track of each participant is effortless.

Minpunten:

As is the case with anything, sometimes things come up and there isn't a feature or option to capture it on EE. That said, whenever it has happened to us, we let EE know and they immediately come up with a solution(s) and tweak our program. I don't consider this a complete con, though, since events are fluid and as such, the software must be as well and EE definitely works well for this.

Transformative Experience

Opmerkingen: Event essentials has been great for allowing us to fully automate our online ticketing, while giving us fully flexible ticketing options as well as a way to manage the sign up and tracking of a variety of different vendors and competition groups at our event. Going from a manual method to online database management also allows us to retain customer information for future events, and get an accurate assessment of our advertising campaigns and the value of our ticket options.

Pluspunten:

In my third year in running this event, we brought on Event Essentials. The amount of volunteer hours their software has freed up has given flexibility back to our organization, and made efficiencies possible that we once only dreamed of. Automating portions of our event that have been done by hand for over four decades, has created a sea change in how we are getting the job done. I am so grateful we partnered with the Event Essentials team.

Minpunten:

My biggest disappointment was that we didn't get started sooner. I am already looking forward to next year's event knowing we have these tools at our disposal from day one.