Event Planner Overwhelm? 14 Event Management Apps and Software to Make Sense of the Chaos
When planning a corporate event, which tasks would occur first? With countless details to manage, from corporate event budgeting to venue coordination and attendee engagement, corporate event planners and experiential marketers often find themselves juggling, feeling overwhelmed and unsure where to start. The key to turning chaos into a well-orchestrated event lies in leveraging specialized event management software to streamline processes and enhance efficiency.
In this guide, we’ll take you through a step-by-step process of planning a corporate event using the best event management apps, ensuring your corporate or company event runs smoothly from start to finish.
Step 1: Establish Event Concept & Goals
Before diving into logistics, clearly define the event’s objectives, target audience, and key outcomes. This foundational step guides all subsequent decisions and helps measure the event’s success.
Key Considerations:
- What is the primary purpose of the event? (e.g., networking, education, celebration, brand activation)
- Who is the target audience?
- What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for success?
Pro Tip: Utilize event management software such as Whova, EventMobi, or Bizzabo to create a project roadmap and centralize event details from the start.
Step 2: Budget Management
Effective budgeting is crucial for avoiding overspending, ensuring financial transparency, and, of course, pleasing the client. Budgeting software helps planners track expenses, manage vendor payments, and generate financial reports.
Recommended Tools:
- Planning Pod: Offers comprehensive budgeting tools, expense tracking, and invoicing features, among other event management tools.
- Event Budget Template by ClickUp: Ideal for detailed financial management, providing customizable budget templates and real-time expense tracking.
Pro Tip: Set up automated alerts within your budgeting software to notify you when expenses approach budget thresholds.
Step 3: Venue & Vendor Management
Selecting the right venue and coordinating with vendors can be a logistical challenge. Use software that automates booking processes.
Recommended Tools:
- EventNation: While not technically an app, EventNation simplifies venue location, qualification and management with online descriptions of vendors + RFPs.
- Tripleseat: Excellent for managing vendor contracts and coordinating event logistics.
Pro Tip: Store all vendor contacts within the software to maintain organization.
Step 4: Attendee Registration
Efficient attendee management not only improves the guest experience but also makes the event planner look great to the client! Registration platforms allow you to automate sign-ups, process payments, and generate guest lists.
Recommended Tools:
- Cvent: Provides end-to-end attendee management solutions, including customizable registration forms and payment processing.
- Whova: Great for easy-to-use tools for online registration and promotions, among many other capabilities to make your event run smoothly.
Pro Tip: Integrate registration software with your email marketing tools to send automated confirmations and reminders to attendees.
Step 5: Marketing & Promotion
Marketing is vital to ensure your event reaches the intended audience. Specialized event marketing software can help create promotional materials, manage social media campaigns, and track engagement.
Recommended Tools:
- Bizzabo: Combines marketing automation with event management, allowing for personalized email campaigns and robust analytics.
- Splash: Amazingly visual, quick-to-create event marketing materials plus surveys to track the impact of the event.
Pro Tip: Use built-in analytics to refine your marketing approach based on audience engagement metrics.
Step 6: Event Logistics
Coordinating the logistics involves managing seating arrangements, event layouts, and real-time updates on the event day. Software that offers visual planning tools can significantly reduce stress.
Recommended Tools:
- Prismm: Provides 3D floor plans and seating arrangement tools.
- Social Tables: Ideal for creating detailed event layouts and managing guest lists.
Pro Tip: Conduct a virtual walkthrough of your event using these tools to identify potential logistical issues before event day.
Step 7: Event Check-In
On the event day, your focus should shift to execution. Automation tools can assist with check-in processes, attendee engagement, and real-time event management.
Recommended Tools:
- ExpoPass: Sometimes it’s best to have a software that does few things, but does them well. ExpoPass handles registration, check-in on iPad kiosks, and badge printing, making the process easy for event staff and improving attendee experience.
- Zkipster: For security features at exclusive events, there’s nothing like Zkipster. It manages guest lists, prints badges and has digital and even facial recognition.
Pro Tip: Use event execution software with mobile capabilities to manage logistics from anywhere in the venue.
Step 8: Event Management
- Whova: Streamlines event check-ins, offers a mobile app for attendees, lead retrieval, real-time attendee tracking, speaker and session management, allows real-time changes to event schedule, sponsor and exhibitor management, staff and volunteer management, lost & found management, etc. Whova is known for its dynamic attendee networking capabilities.
- EventMobi: Offers similar capabilities to Whova, but integrates live-streaming capabilities for virtual or hybrid events, too. (Whova integrates with Zoom.)
- MainEvent: For the specific needs of experiential marketers, who have to manage field teams that may be remote, there’s MainEvent. It offers tools to plan and organize brand activations, manage and pay brand ambassadors, and pays particular attention to measuring return on investment (ROI) to report back to clients.
Step 9: Post-Event Analysis
After the event, evaluating its success is crucial. Collect feedback, analyze performance data, and generate reports to inform future event strategies.
- MainEvent: See above for capabilities and a special shout-out on its ROI feature.
- SurveyMonkey: Easily create surveys to gather attendee feedback.
Pro Tip: Schedule automated follow-up emails to thank attendees and request feedback immediately after the event.
If you don’t see the event management software that works for you here, visit EventNation‘s event management apps listings to see all the many solutions available to you as a corporate event planner or experiential marketer.
Conclusion: Plan Smarter, Not Harder
By integrating specialized event management software into each phase of the planning process, professional event planners can transform a hectic schedule into a streamlined, efficient workflow. These tools not only save time and reduce stress but also enhance the overall quality and success of your events.
Ready to take your event planning to the next level? Start exploring these software options today and watch your event come together!
Please rate and review your event apps and software here on EventNation.com, plus join our growing, free community of professional event planners right here on EventNation. Let our community know how awesome your corporate event or company meeting was with one of these event apps working for you!
Author, Faith Keiser, is the founder of eventnation.com. Faith founded a successful corporate event photography and videography business in Philadelphia, and ran the studio for over 10 years. Before that, she was a frequent freelance contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Faith loves her husband, two young adult daughters, and two rescue dogs, Piper and Mikey, who wag their tails happily because Faith moved her desk and computer into “their room” to be with them while working.
P.S. EventNation.com is in beta. We are writing articles like this one, but have not yet populated the website with listings of corporate event venues and vendors. We’re collecting listings (like the ones in this article) behind the scenes. We hope you’ll check back to this website for our launch in March 2025! Thanks for your interest!
