The Power of One

If you organise events then I’m guessing you already know that time is a commodity that you don’t have enough of, and stress is an unwelcome one that you have in abundance! Just to back that up, event planners regularly feature in the top ten of the most stressful jobs.

With that in mind, why do some event planners still either use a combination of offline and online media, or a variety of different software packages and then manually combine the different sets of data?

I recently visited an event planner that takes registrations for their events via quite a nice online registration form on their website. I asked them what happens once the registration has been submitted and was amazed to hear that all they get is an email with the registrant’s details, which they then have to manually input onto an Excel spreadsheet! That’s a lot of work to do for every registration on every event, especially as some of their events have hundreds of registrations. I asked them to go back a step and tell me how they invite people to their events and promote them. They use a separate email marketing platform for that. The same email marketing platform also handles event updates. On the day of the event, attendees are checked-in using a printed version of the attendee spreadsheet.

Just to summarise...

1. Data is uploaded and email invitations are sent out from email marketing platform

2. Registrations via an online booking form on their website

3. Email to event planner with registration details

4. Attendee details manually input onto an Excel spreadsheet

5. Upload attendee spreadsheet to email marketing platform to send out event emails

6. Manually check attendees in via the spreadsheet

That’s 6 different labour intensive activities that have to be carried out! That doesn’t include any post event activity either.

For an occupation that was number 5 on the 2014 list of the most stressful jobs, that seems to me like a lot of unnecessary work when there is technology out there that will do all of this from one platform.

Mitingu is one of those platforms that could handle that whole process for the event planner.

Here’s how...

1. Contacts are either uploaded or selected via an integration with the client’s CRM

2. The branded event site and email templates are quickly set up

3. Email invitations scheduled and sent directly from the platform

4. Registrations automatically updated into the attendees list

5. Scheduled, triggered email updates and reminders are sent automatically

6. Check-in via Greet Desk (mitingu’s mobile check-in app) and automatically updated on the attendee list in Mitingu

So basically, all 6 of that particular event planner’s activities could be handled from one platform and without any time consuming manual intervention and collation of data.

That’s definitely the Power of One.