I worked with Attendify on developing an event app for the Yale Environmental Sustainability Summit (YESS) during the fall of 2015. It was a three day conference that took place across campus with high profile speakers and a somewhat dynamic schedule (lots of breakout sessions and panels). The app was a huge success and I received several comments regarding its usefulness. The features I used predominantly was the schedule which had bios of speakers and panelists and also allowed me to enter hyperlinks to our livestream webpage of the speakers and panels. This was great because it allowed people to go back and link to recorded sessions that they missed through the app even after the conference. The map feature is very handy to highlight and provide info about different locations and you can also upload pdf maps of the interior of buildings for example. I would say the only part of the app I didn't use anywhere near its capability was the social platform. It seemed more likely to me that people would utilize twitter handles and Facebook groups rather than add an additional social networking platform devoted specifically to the event, however, had I promoted it more actively it may have been better utilized.

-Responsiveness of the Attendify staff via the chat window. They answered any questions I had pretty much instantly at any time of day. This was huge. -Features. I feel like I was limited more by my capacity to work on the app than the features that the app provided. -Ease of use. I am not a "tech" person but this platform is extremely easy to manage and actually kind of fun to use.

-Attendify staff encouraged me to password protect the app but I wish I hadn't. Not a huge deal.

Overall our experience was good with Hopin, but there are definitely things that need to be fixed in the platform. I mentioned most of our issues above, but another thing that caused some issues was the who can view/moderator section in Sessions. For one part of our conference, I wanted sessions viewable to a specific ticket type. We had certain speakers to moderate the session, but the only way they could see that session is if all speakers had access, which is what we ended up doing, but was not ideal. I wish anyone who is added as a moderator could also see the session, even if they aren't part of the ticket type that the session is viewable to. Another feature I would suggest is the ability to change someone's ticket type. It would have been great to just make one click on my end and change the ticket type if someone registered incorrectly. To summarize, Hopin has a lot of potential and definitely met our needs, but still has some work to be done.

I like that Hopin looks and feels like an in-person conference, without the outdated and clunky design of many of the other options that are out there.

There are quite a few things that are a bit buggy with Hopin. The word of the day for our conference was "refresh" because so many people had trouble with sound or video. Thankfully refreshing the page fixed most issues, but it was a bit frustrating how often that was needed. We also learned that you have to be in Chrome for a lot of things to work, which wasn't an issue on our end but became an issue for a lot of speakers. We had to do a lot of walkthroughs before the main event to get everyone up and running. The biggest issue was playing Youtube videos in sessions. The videos would sometimes start in the middle for everyone, or they would be fine on the screen for whoever started the video but everyone else would see the playback start halfway through. Our quick fix was to add the videos to the Expo so they could be viewed at any time, but it definitely interrupted the flow of our event.

They did not deliver what they promised. They told us that support would be available during our event and there was just this lousy email address. Also, we did test the software with speakers and companies that would speak this went without problems. On the day of the actual event, a lot of problems showed up. At the feedback session, they told us that there was an update rolled out a few days ago, which felt scripted. As we already saw the same excuse on a review site this probably is otherwise, they would announce an update. Hopin is an example of a too fast-growing company focused on making revenue.

The software has a neat interface. The software is deductive and you cant get lost.

That the software couldn't manage the actual day of the event. Speakers and participants reported issues but no information or notification about the problem could be noticed. This was for 20% or so what is too much for a high-level event. This created a lot of stress for the participants and to us the organization.

Hopin is a reliable product with some great features. We especially liked the random networking feature which automatically allocated attendees a random member of the audience for a short video introduction. It was also great to be able to do live Q&A via video popup after a session- this is a neat feature that I've not seen done as well on other platforms.

Hopin isn't as user-friendly as I would have liked. The process for getting speakers onto the platform was complicated and we subsequently experienced several instances of inexplicable login errors which took the team a lot of time to resolve. Not ideal when running a live virtual event across multiple time zones.