Event Essentials is great for small businesses

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Customizing a flexible event management platform

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

The platform is easy to use. It has a lot more features than one at first realizes.

Pros

the customer service is very professional and kind; Customer rep was super helpful at a moment of crisis in our organization. the customizable forms are great. The interface the public sees resembles our website graphics.

Cons

have to wait for centralized staff to do changes --takes more days sometimes than we needed once you are in a doc reviewing an application there is no easy way to proceed to the next one -have to go back to the full menu

Transformative Experience

Event essentials has been great for allowing us to fully automate our online ticketing, while giving us fully flexible ticketing options as well as a way to manage the sign up and tracking of a variety of different vendors and competition groups at our event. Going from a manual method to online database management also allows us to retain customer information for future events, and get an accurate assessment of our advertising campaigns and the value of our ticket options.

Pros

In my third year in running this event, we brought on Event Essentials. The amount of volunteer hours their software has freed up has given flexibility back to our organization, and made efficiencies possible that we once only dreamed of. Automating portions of our event that have been done by hand for over four decades, has created a sea change in how we are getting the job done. I am so grateful we partnered with the Event Essentials team.

Cons

My biggest disappointment was that we didn't get started sooner. I am already looking forward to next year's event knowing we have these tools at our disposal from day one.

Perfectly Personalized

EE has automated our vendor application process while still allowing us to personalize and approve each application. I used to bring applications into a spreadsheet, prepare individual invoices, and keep a record of payment in the credit card processor account as well as the spreadsheet. Now, everything is integrated. I can customize a response and hit "approve", and the vendor receives an email with a payment link. We were also able to set up a payment plan which was super helpful.

Pros

We are able to keep all of our event information in one place, personalized to exactly fit our needs. It is a relief to know that when our event opens, we'll have everything at our fingertips, accessible to everyone on our team. The EE programmers patiently worked with us to tweak every last form, field and font to our satisfaction. Our EE pages match our web site exactly, looking professional and easy to use.

Cons

Everything is working as we expected and I haven't found anything disappointing.