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14 Tech Tools to Help Pivot Your Event Planning

For many event and meeting peeps, tech tools are an essential part of their planning toolkit.

Now with events going virtual or incorporating hybrid components and new guidelines requiring socially-distanced layouts, comprehensive guest list records, contactless or self-check-in processes, and more, planners need new tech tools to assist with these different processes.

Below are several tech tools to help pivot your event and meeting planning in the COVID-19 era. (This list isn’t comprehensive—just a small sampling of all the available event management and planning technology!)

Looking for a convenient way to expand your event and meeting planning knowledge, earn CMP credits, and continue your professional development? Become an ELI member!


Allseated

Allseated offers several digital solutions to help planners and clients visualize their events. Planners use the Allseated OPS planning tools to design and fine-tune socially-distanced layouts and seating charts while managing guest lists and tracking RSVPs.

And for venues using the Allseated Vision platform, planners can take virtual tours of event spaces and meeting rooms – eliminating the need to travel for in-person site visits and walkthroughs. Event teams can also meet virtually within the event spaces (accessed via tablet, laptop, desktop, or VR headset) to come together on important decisions and plans.

Airtable

If there isn’t reason enough to like this project management platform, earlier this year, the company made it’s Airtable Pro solution free for humanitarian COVID-19 response efforts.

Fans rave about the platform’s ease-of-use, detailed and customizable templates, and a variety of visual formats, like calendar, grid, or Kanban board views to keep tabs on all aspects of event planning.

Brilliant

Looking for a turn-key provider to deliver swag to virtual event attendees wherever they are?

Brilliant provides branded and upscale gifts and even includes a Preferred Gift feature to streamline collecting gift recipients’ personal preferences, such as addresses, sizes, and colors – meaning no more need to track down individual recipient details and update spreadsheets.

ConfBot

When events are virtual and guests have a question or need help, planners need a simple and easy-to-use support channel.

ConfBot is a chatbot for conferences and other events designed to provide attendee communication, gather feedback, and enable networking through a text interface. Attendees can set personalized schedules, and planners can use the service to showcase the program, make group announcements, and more.

Curate

Used by florists, caterers, rental professionals, and others, Curate automates tedious planning tasks, including creating interactive proposals, tracking inventory, shopping lists, and recipes, and managing payments.

Flodesk

While there are many email marketing platforms out there to choose from, planners embrace Flodesk because of it’s beautifully designed email templates and user-friendly workflow.

GiveSmart

Whether you’ve recently moved to online fundraising, or are embracing a year-round digital donation strategy, GiveSmart’s platform allows organizations to create a customizable and mobile-friendly event site, complete with mobile bidding, text-to-donate, item management, and a comprehensive dashboard and reporting features.

Monday

With ready-made templates and drag-and-drop building blocks – including those designed for event management – this team and project management software is a staple for many planners.

Monday provides a highly visual tracking system with simplified status updates to make it easy for groups of in-house planners or event vendors to schedule staff, book speakers, secure vendors, map venues, and more.

OneCause

As in-person fundraisers are on pause, organizations especially non-profits – are looking for ways to generate donations through online and virtual initiatives.

Enter OneCause, who provides mobile bidding, peer-to-peer fundraising, online stores & auctions, and online and mobile text donation tools. Pre-packaged plans make it easy for organizations of all sizes and different budgets to get started.

Prowly

Launching a new virtual event or just looking to get the word out about your event? Prowly provides everything needed to get media coverage, from finding relevant media contacts to sending eye-catching visual press releases.

It also lets you safely sync and manage media contacts in the cloud with other team members and create a professional brand newsroom to make it easier for the media to discover and share your event news.

Regpack

Need a way to manage virtual or online event registrations and payments on your website? Regpack is a single event registration system. Features include mobile-optimized forms, a custom registration flow that uses conditional logic, secure payment processing, and robust data and reporting features.

RSVPify

While many events no longer use paper RSVPs, some non-profits and social events like weddings still do.Go green and eliminate the risks of multiple people handling paper responses with RSVPify.

From either paper or digital invitations, guests visit your online RSVP website and complete their customized RSVP, which can also be used to track responses for secondary events. Planners create a seating chart of accepted guests using the platform’s Drag-and-Drop Seating Chart feature.

Social Tables

Acquired by Cvent in 2018, Social Tables offers diagramming tools to help planners create to-scale, safe and socially-distanced layouts that vendors or clients can use to collaborate in real-time.

In addition, Social Tables helps planners with guest management and even visual seat assignments — providing a record of who sat where.

SwagUp

Build a custom, high-quality swag pack, or select from a collection of preset packages to engage remote attendees or employees. With SwagUp’s easy-to-use website, planners can view the curated collections or choose everything from the container to the items inside for custom options, complete with pricing details to ballpark costs for proposals and estimates quickly.

What tools have helped you successfully pivot your planning for virtual and hybrid events and meetings? Share your faves with us on FacebookTwitter, or LinkedIn.