It has been a pleasure to work with Event Essentials. They've made our festival management so easy!

It's very easy to use and it integrates well into our current website. Managing festivals used to be a pain. Now, it's a breeze. No more trying to keep track of a bunch of data in different spreadsheets. The Event Essentials dashboard makes it easy to get a quick view of approved vendors, ticket sales and sponsors. And, everything is very automated. When we approve a vendor they are automatically sent an email that provides them with the link to submit a payment. I did my homework before selecting Event Essentials and it paid off! I truly think they are the best value when it comes to event management software!

Pros

It was very easy to get this product customized and integrated into our current website! The Event Essentials team was very responsive any time we had and requested changes that they needed to make. I am very pleased at how much easier it has become to manage our festivals, including reviewing and approving exhibitors, receive payments and selling ticket online. I also love their exhibitor profile feature that allows each exhibitor to have their own bio page. Best of all, their prices were very competitive.

Cons

The only downside that comes to mind is that they are located on the West Coast and we are on the East Coast. Regardless, they have been very responsive and I am amazes at how quickly they respond to any change requests.

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.

Wish we discovered EE sooner!

Tucson Meet Yourself is a Multi Cultural festival that attacks over 120,000 people over the span on 3 days. We host over 60 different food vendors, 160 performers, & 700 volunteers. Event Essentials fits our needs and allows us to use 1 software for multiple components of our sign up/managing needs.Rep is wonderful to work with! I would highly suggest Event Essentials.

Pros

We love how Event Essentials has created a software that is customizable to our specific needs. They are prompt to address the issues that may arise or adjust things that we need changed.

Cons

I can hardly think of any cons. Hopefully this business can grow and expand. I think it would be wonderful for a representative to visit/physically interact each organizations within Event Essentials to completely understand and have a good grasp of what we do.

It was so easy to use and our attendees were impressed with how fast they got into our event.

Dear Event Essentials I wanted to take a moment and thank you and your staff on behalf of the Kiwanis Club of Thousand Oaks and our Charitable Foundation. Your support and customer service were outstanding before and during our BrewFest event this year. When we first discussed our needs with you for more efficiently handling our check in process and our vendor registration, your solution sounded like it would solve our needs. It in fact was better than we hoped for. Our vendors found the system easy to use and had no issues using it. We actually received more complete information so we could make a decision on them attending the event and also with the information provided; we were able to update our own BrewFest and Facebook web sites in a manner of minutes. The check in process and how it would work on event day was a major concern of ours. The software not only streamlined our check-in process, our attendees entered our event even quicker than we dreamed possible. Checking in over 400 attendees in 20 minutes was over the top successful and helped make the customer experience extremely enjoyable. The 3rd area of concern for us was the online ticketing process. Not only was this easy for our attendees, the tracking capabilities of the Event Essentials back office is just fantastic. All of the information we were looking to capture is there and very easy to work with. We now have a complete mailing list so we can stay in contact throughout the year. We understand that we have only use just a portion of the capabilities of your system and we look forward to integrating it more next year. Thank you again for the customer service, support and especially the marketing help with our event. Feel free to contact me at 805-490-4024 for an outstanding reference anytime. Sincerely, Randy Senzig Immediate Past President 4th Annual BrewFest Co-Chairperson

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.

Great tool with full customization and personalized customer support!

Working with Event Essentials has been great! They have been very responsive to our needs and generally implement our change requests within a few days.

Pros

I really appreciate the ability to customize the tool's user interface and features to meet our business needs.

Cons

The software doesn't currently allow us to approve several vendors at once. But, to be fair, we haven't requested this ability. I'm willing to bet they will be able to add this feature once we request it.

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.

The Blue and the Gray - Civil War Reenactment

Event Essentials helped us analyze past customer purchases, both at the gate and on line and help us design a completely new ticket package. It definitely gave the customer more choices and allowed us to upsell our offerings. Our contacts were knowledgeable and got back to us quickly on ticket issues and quickly came up with solutions. For this past year, they were definitely worth the money. Lyle Pennington Rotary Club of Moorpark Marketing Chair - The Blue and the Gray

Pros

It gives us excellent summary data to do planning going forward.

Cons

I am not aware of any issues. Our Secretary may have some different input.

Ticket sales/sponsor/vendor management for a 400 person fundraiser

Pros

HTML. Lots of useful tools, great customer service. Nice reports, ticket sales by type/coupon code, etc. Additional options to manage workers, vendors, sponsors. Built in safeguards to prevent costly mistakes. Can use your companies own credit services. Ticket fee revenue sharing. You keep all the data.

Cons

No custom-field reports, must be requested through customer service. Time for auto sign out really short. Seemed like 15 minutes or so.

More than software or event management - Event Essentials is T R A N S F O R M A T I O N A L

Pros

The whole package; yes it started with my organization needing help with a fairly large venue festival; it needed updating and modernizing. Event essentials came in, took charge, proposed among other things a ticket eFulfillment solution and and auction manager -This festival has never run so smoothly! There used to be lines 6 and 7 blocks long of disgruntled festoival goers waiting to be admitted into the venue. The lines are down to a few people deep, remarkable. So much easier than the way we used to do things.

Cons

Well frankly it is alot of new technology to learn and its alot to grasp for some of the staff; we had alot of inertia as to how things were supposed to be run, way of doing things and it is now almost 180 degrees different; but the lines are shorter, people leave happier, security has an easier job because the new ticket system kept the bad guys out!

Sherman Oaks Street Festival

The Sherman Oaks Chamber of Commerce has been organizing the Sherman Oaks Street Fair for 24 years. This past year we decided to work with Event Essentials to develop a new website to try to automate what was a very paper intensive process of managing about 150 vendors, multiple entertainment zones, volunteers and sponsors. Our new website and administrative site saved us hours and hours of manual work. We were able to keep track of our vendors online, create excel spreadsheets to sort vendors and analyze results and even send ad-hoc emails (both mass ones and ones to just certain kinds of vendors) quickly and easily. We were able to update information in real time. Whether we had a last minute change on the stage, a new sponsor or a community update, it was easy to log-on and keep our website accurate. We even created a great photo gallery of our event loading the hundreds of photos took about 5 minutes! The staff at Event Essentials were responsive and went out of their way to solve any issue that came up. We look forward to celebrating our 25th Anniversary of the Sherman Oaks Street Fair working with Event Essentials.

Old Boney Mtn Hot Summer Night Festival

Event Essentials ticket tracking helped us keep very accurate accounting records, especially as this event is our main fundraiser. Their scanners at main point of entry worked perfectly. The system also performs refunds quickly, which pleases attendees and promotes our good reputation.

Pros

Easy to use for attendees to buy tickets. Sponsors of event could be added minute by minute.

Cons

Can't think of a thing I would criticize. Sorry.

Easy and seamless

They understand how to create a great experience at point of check in.

Pros

For a volunteer organization, the software program was easy to understand and gave us up to date and pertinent data. The check in process with bar codes is fast and efficient.

Cons

There is nothing I can think of at this time.

Perfect