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When you’re organizing an event, it can often seem that there are a thousand and one things that you need to think about. It can be difficult to stay on top of everything, and it can also be difficult to maintain effective communication with speakers and attendees.
The good news is that there are tools out there that can help you do all this, and we’re going to have a little look at just ten of them today. So without further ado, let’s dive in and get started:
Slack is one of the most useful communication tools out there, and it’s perfect for instant messaging either one-on-one or in small groups. You can also create dedicated rooms for subject matters. As an organizer, you can use Slack to stay in touch with all the speakers and to brainstorm subject matter and marketing ideas. You could even consider inviting event attendees to join you on Slack so that you can keep the discussion going after the conference is over.
Zoom is ideal for one-on-one and group video calls, and it can help you to augment what you’re doing on Slack by providing an avenue for real-time communication. It’s also useful if the event is taking place entirely or in part online, and you can even live stream from Slack to other platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
Trello is a project management tool, and it can be super useful for keeping track of where you’re at with the various different organizational elements of your conference. You can use it to assign tasks among your core team and to keep track of the status of jobs.
Canva is a graphic design tool for people who aren’t graphic designers, and it’s often used by social media marketers who are looking to create visual content. For event organizers, it can be a powerful way of making promotional graphics to drive attendance. It’s also useful as a tool for speakers to help make their slides come to life.
Speaking of making slides come to life, Prezi is a useful tool for making animated slideshows that break the mold and look and work very differently to traditional PowerPoint presentations. The downside is that they can take a little longer to make, but that is often worth it for the effect on your audience.
Dropbox is a tool for storing and sharing files, and it has a bunch of neat features that are worth knowing about. For example, it offers version control and the ability to easily roll back to a previous iteration if something goes wrong, such as if you want to undo some changes or your file becomes corrupted.
Mailchimp is the perfect tool for managing and carrying out email marketing campaigns, which are a necessity if you want to let people know about your event and get them to book tickets. Of course, it’s only the mechanism by which you’ll send your emails out, and so it won’t get you far if you don’t have a list to send to. Still, it offers advanced functionality including powerful analytics and the ability to run A/B tests.
Otter.ai is a powerful transcription tool that can be used either on its own or be plugged into Zoom to provide real-time transcriptions for meetings and online events. It can be useful for taking the minutes of your planning meetings, and it can also be great for providing transcriptions to event attendees. It’s one of the best applications out there at what it does, and so you’d be crazy to miss out on it.
Evernote is a digital note-taking application that’s designed to make it as easy as possible for you to take notes on the go and to then access them from all your devices. You can quickly and easily share the notes you make and save multiple different formats including written text, images and recorded audio. It can be a useful way of storing your thoughts and sharing them with your team as you’re organizing an event.
Last but not least, Eventbrite is a super useful tool for organizing attendees for both online and offline events. In fact, it’s the market leader, and a big reason for that is the sheer amount of functionality that it brings to the table. It’s particularly good at hosting online events such as webinars through to main conferences, but there are plenty of other great ways for you to harness it and to put it to use.
Now that you know our must-have tools for event organizers, we want to hear from you. Which tools have you found useful while hosting events, and is there anything that we’ve missed that you would recommend?
As always, be sure to share your thoughts in the comments so that we can keep the discussion going, and don’t forget to follow us on your social networking sites of choice so that you don’t miss a post. We’ll see you soon!
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