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Meet Ella. She’s an event manager for a busy event management company. Her company organises over 30 large conferences and exhibitions every year. A lot of these are annual, but many are one off events. Either way, they all take a lot of time and money to organise.

Ella’s company is quite traditional in the way they manage their events. They use a mix of direct mail and email to promote their events and take the majority of their bookings via a form on their website, via emails, from people completing forms and posting them in or via telephone. Many of the events require payment and Ella has to do this manually over the phone for each delegate.

Ella relies heavily on spreadsheets. Each event has multiple spreadsheets, all with many tabs. These help her manage the delegate list, their contact details, dietary requirements, payment details, travel arrangements and more. Ella regularly gets sent on training courses to help boost her spreadsheet skills – however, no amount of training can help reduce the number of spreadsheets she uses! They seem to grow and grow...

A lot of Ella’s time is spent transferring data from one medium to another – mostly into her spreadsheets. The bookings via postal form need to be manually entered, the emails

she gets from the online booking forms need to be manually entered, as does the information she takes via the phone when taking bookings. This manual data entry takes a long time, and errors often happen. As well as entering data into her spreadsheets, she also has to log into their CRM system to update their customer records when they register for an event, and send an email to the finance department to let them know the delegate has paid (or not as sometimes is the case – which then requires Ella to chase the delegate and update the finance department with the latest information).

One of the jobs Ella dreads is the printing of all the delegate badges. She needs to extract the information from her spreadsheets and paste it all into her badge template she’s created in her Microsoft Word programme. This is such a long and tedious job – and most of the time it never prints properly first time round! There are many days where Ella feels like throwing her printer out the window and walking out for good!

Once the badges have finally been sorted and the day of the event arrives (which normally comes which an extremely late night in the office the night before), Ella has to

constantly carry around huge folders full of her printed spreadsheets. It’s difficult to manage and address problems on the day as she can’t get access to all the information she needs. It’s generally pretty stressful.

Once the event is over, Ella’s boss asks her for the delegate feedback. This was done via printed sheets that Ella handed out during the event. She has to quickly type all the

comments and add all the feedback scores into (yet another) spreadsheet. However her boss doesn’t want the raw data; he wants reports and graphs which analysis the ROI (Return On Investment). Ella is trying to do this as best she can, but she’s conscious of another event coming up that she needs to start planning.

All in all, Ella is a pretty stressed event manager. Her bosses aren’t exactly sure what value their events are providing, and they can see they need to find a way to help Ella gain control and visibility over their events. At the same time, they’d quite like to cut their costs by improving efficiency across the whole company. Ella’s complaining she can’t

perform her job to the best of her ability, finance are complaining about lack of visibility with regards to budgets, spending and delegate payments, and they can’t see what events are performing well, and which aren’t.

There’s only one answer – event management software.

Come back next week to see how Ella's life as an event manager has been drastically improved since her company installed evocos event software.

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Find a venue, make sure it is the right venue, select your target delegate audience, send branded invites, register the delegates, take payment if required, send communication to those registered delegates, schedule speakers, manage workshops, produce badges and barcodes, produce reports...wow...the list goes on and on..but is this sounding all to familiar? Managing a conference is complicated, time consuming and extremely hard work. More and more conference and event managers are starting to use a managed service to handle all these tedious tasks for them leaving them free to get on with the more important areas of managing a conference.

Most conference and event managers will look at an event management company to manage their conference for them, however, these companies still need to utilise the relevant event technology, such as; invitation management tool, microsite builder, online registration, email communication with your delegates and a report writer to analyse your event stats. This all starts to add up in cost and becomes a financial drain and more than likely your budget won't extend to these extras. Here at evocos we did our research and recognised their was a real need from the events market for this kind of service and on the back of this research we have launched an Event and Conference Managed Service to help you manage your conference, minisming cost and increasing efficiency. 

Our conference and event service will do the following for you:

• Affordable flat fee to manage the conference for you
• Design & create a website branded to your corporate specifications
• Liaise with your event & marketing team to ensure correct brand specifications
• Configure & upload your delegate database  
• Send branded e-invites to your known users
• Provide a single click transaction from e-invite to personalised & branded landing page
• Allow your delegates to register online through your website
• Customise your online booking form per event
• Enhance delegate liaison by managing a delegates full day itinerary
• Maintain & manage delegate registration and information
• Send automated delegate booking email confirmations
• Produce customised reports based on your specific event and delegate requirements
• Produce personalised delegate packs tailored specifically to each individual delegate
• Collate and store relevant information and produce delegate badges prior to the event
• Ensure total control over access through production of individual barcode security
• Provide a comprehensive schedule of all one to one meetings, workshops, seminars

The events market is a tough industry and everyone remembers your "last conference or event" so it is crucial that your conference or event is a success. Why don't you call and speak to one of our team to ask for a free demonstration of how our new Managed Conference and Event Support Service will ensure your event is a success at a very competitive and cost effective price.