Planning, organizing, and managing an event or conference is a huge undertaking. To pull off a successful event, you need the right event apps to seamlessly integrate with your event to help you distribute content to team members and speakers, market, provide in-depth reporting to sponsors and partners, and provide attendees a personalized experience.
Event apps can integrate with your existing systems to deliver results that increase buy-in from all stakeholders. But with so many event apps in the market, how do you choose the right one?
Ultimately, you want apps that are simple to use and seamlessly integrate with your existing systems. Here’s a list of the best apps broken down by category.
The best event apps for a personalized experience
Eventbrite
eventbrite.com
Eventbrite is the leading event technology platform to allow anyone to easily plan, promote, and sell tickets to their events. Users can publish their events on Facebook, Twitter, and other social-networking sites directly from Eventbrite’s interface, making it easy for attendees to find and purchase tickets to your event online. Eventbrite is an ideal event solution for music festivals, conferences, venues, fundraisers, political rallies and more.
Free & Paid (Percentage) services
Glisser
glisser.com
Have you ever used a PowerPoint presentation at a conference or during a keynote session and wanted a way to engage the audience and measure the effectiveness of your presentation? If so, you should try Glisser. Glisser is a presentation software with an integrated audience response system that helps you create interactive presentations and track audience engagement. The software increases audience engagement through participation with slide sharing, live polling, digital Q&A, and Twitter wall posts. Attendees can interact with your presentations from any electronic device. Glisser’s presentation software is ideal for live events, training sessions, and classrooms.
Free trial & Premium packages for additional features
CrowdCompass
crowdcompass.com
Do you need a mobile app for your event? CrowdCompass by Cvent, is an event app built to increase attendee engagement and produce a strong return on investment. The software is simple to use and allows users the ability to brand the app with their company guidelines, with features such as in-app messaging, activity feeds, live Q&A, live polling, gamification, and more. CrowdCompass is ideal for conferences, tradeshows, meetings, and events that range in size from 50 to 50,000 attendees.
Free demo & Monthly/Yearly subscription plans
Rawpixel
rawpixel.com
If you’re looking for a stellar selection of photos to promote your events, look no further than Rawpixel. Rawpixel has the most diverse stock photos in the industry. What sets their photographs and illustrations apart from other stock photography sites is the custom look and feel of their photo galleries, not to mention the photos are rich with vibrant colors. What we appreciate most about Rawpixel, is the fact a large majority of their photos are not found on other stock photography sites nor are they overly saturated in other online publications. The hero image in this post was downloaded from Rawpixel.
Free and Premium
The best event apps for networking
Switchit
switchitapp.com
If you want to give your attendees a modern, personalized way to network, you should use Switchit. Switchit is an all-in-one digital business card application built for sharing digital business cards on the go, with in-card support for dynamic video or branded graphics. The app is great for networking by automatically saving the contact information of people you share your digital card with such as their phone number, name, email address and photo when used in a closed environment. Following up with contacts post-event is easy with Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCloud Calendar integration. Users can schedule follow-up meetings or create reminder alerts from the app.
Free
The best event apps for collaboration and content management
Social Tables
socialtables.com
Social Tables is a collaborative web-based event planning platform that helps you see what your event will look like in real-time. The software uses accurate, three-dimensional floor plans, which allow event organizers to quickly build rooms and position items/furniture in a virtual environment. Through collaboration, event organizers can print a Social Tables diagram, of the venue space, to brainstorm plans and share with team members so collectively everyone can make smarter decisions faster. Social Tables has excellent customer support along with an easy to use interface.
Free sign up & Paid service
Hubb
hubb.me
Organizing a conference and joggling all the information needed to manage the event can feel overwhelming. Hubb’s cloud-based platform helps meeting planners easily plan, manage and market content for their events. The software saves you time by empowering all key stakeholders such as speakers, exhibitors, staffers, track owners, and graders to manage their own information. The software then reflects those changes in real-time on your events marketing website, mobile app or onsite digital signage. Hubb pushes emails automatically to users that have not completed their profile or uploaded critical information. This ensures everyone inputs their content and meets key deadlines. Manage complex workflows, monitor task completions, content approval, event demographics and more.
Free trial & Premium packages for additional features
Basecamp
basecamp.com
Project management is critical when managing numerous tasks to pull off a successful event. Basecamp is an online project management tool that brings everything your company is working on under one roof — organized, centralized, and clear so everyone knows what to do. Basecamp allows teams of all sizes to use cloud-based tasks list, discussions, documents, calendars and more to ensure projects stay on track. Projects can have multiple to-do lists which make Basecamp flexible for larger business projects that may span across multiple departments.
Free trial & Premium packages for additional features
Connecting the dots
The right event app can be the difference between a successful, well-managed event or total chaos. Do your research and choose the app best for you.
Originally published at switchitapp.com on April 17, 2018.
