Event Essentials

Event Essentials is great for small businesses

Commenti: I have really enjoyed working with Event Essentials. They have taken the time to get to know our needs and modified their based products to develop a custom solution that meets our needs. They are

Aspetti positivi:

The main thing I love about this product is how it can be, and has been, customized to meet our needs. I love the ability to automatically have vendor bios (business name, contact information, description of services and products, and a photo) to be automatically posted to a web page once we approve the vendor. I really like the easy to use interface to view and manage vendors. I can quickly find vendors, view their status, make changes and approve or reject them. Our vendors love the "Returning Exhibitor" feature that allows the vendor to submit an application using most of the data they entered on their prior application. This saves them a lot of time.

Aspetti negativi:

The system does not (currently) allow vendors to make changes to content. This requires us to make changes on their behalf. Fortunately, this is not difficult to do.

Event Essentials is amazing!

Commenti: Craig and Kiffen are a good team, they understand events and can tailor their system to anyone, we are a good example of that. They took on our weekly event, which was challenging, and were successful in creating a system that our vendors love.

Aspetti positivi:

This company worked well with our unique event and tailored a system for us. They took the time to learn about us, came out to see our event and talk to staff. It was very personalized service and worked with our budget as well. They care, they're patient and are really nice people too, that helps when you're trying to do something new.

Aspetti negativi:

Our event is pretty unique, and weekly, there were a few things that had to be created from scratch and took more time than we anticipated, but they communicated along the way so at least we understood any delays. In fairness we were also still operating during the whole process of creating our new vendor system and onboarding all of our vendors, which added additional hurdles.

Horrible experience; I could never recommend this.

Aspetti positivi:

They only good thing about Event Essentials was the price; they were very affordable and during the sales process, it was easy to communicate with the sales managers.

Aspetti negativi:

Literally everything else. When we signed our contract, we had a very long list of things that we were told would be able to be implemented and customized. As soon as we signed on, everything went dark as far as communication went. We went multiple weeks without updates, sometimes months. While things were made and created, almost nothing worked as we expected it to. We were told that it was because "we were on the old system" but never offered a chance to upgrade to a new system. Critical updates and deadlines were missed frequently by our account representatives to the point that we had to move to an entirely different event management company because the system was not functional for us. Truly a disappointment, because Event Essentials had such great potential; they overpromised and vastly underdelivered.

Great customizable platform for non-profits and event companies

Commenti: Craig has been a fantastic liaison, metaphorically holding our hands through the launch, and checking in as we add new features to the system. The actual system works well, and any bugs we find are addressed in a timely manner.

Aspetti positivi:

This is a great customizable platform that can has been shaped to meet the organization's needs for producing our weekly event.

Aspetti negativi:

Like working with any 3rd party contractor, the client must keep up communications and updates to move forward with projects. You're not their only client, so do your part to keep up the momentum.

Customizing a flexible event management platform

Commenti: Our experience has been very good. Custom configuring a management system like ours is not for the feint of heart. Nor does it happen overnight. I think the EE team underestimated the complexity of our business process. We worked through that. I think a stronger guiding hand from EE's project manager would have helped us better organize ourselves. However, I commend their dedication and follow through because in the end, we have what we envisioned.

Aspetti positivi:

Event Essentials enabled us to take an existing event management platform and configure it to our specific and quite unique needs. The flexibility of their platform is amazing. The EE team configured the system to accommodate our workflow. No more work-arounds. And that is a huge plus. The other farmers market management platforms were not able to be as responsive to customization. Interface is important to me and Event Essentials is quite good. Search and filtering are robust and snappy making it easy to view data as desired. Organizing content under a tab system is very helpful and essentially provides pre-filtered data sets. They have a robust Portal allowing our market vendors to access their accounts, view their applications, their registrations, email history and soon, invoices and payments. Vendors may initiate changes through their portal. And, the system has customized email notification that are associated with specific actions confirming status to vendors and notifying our staff action is required. We develop and manages about 15 seasonal farmers markets. We needed to integrate our management system tying together the two primary functional areas of our company -- Vendor sales & management and Market Operations management. We deal with a large amount of data and lots of moving parts. We needed to integrate a robust daily market reporting system. We needed a robust reporting system with great filters. Event Essentials is doing this for us

Aspetti negativi:

There a couple of things that could be better. We do a fair amount of data entry in the field and the display on smaller screens, i.e. iPad Mini's needs some attention. I suspect the EE team will work this out at some point. It is important to us to be able to self manage some back end features. Currently they are giving us that ability incrementally which is probably a good thing. It would be helpful to be able to create report templates, update more text areas, ourselves. That too, I think come in time.