Using Technology in Your Events Business

“Event Tech” is the new buzzword for 2021, and the amount of platforms coming out to service the events industry is quite incredible. From Hoppin’s $12 million raise, The Vendry’s exclusive event pros network, to Merri’s 3D event design software, event tech solutions are more apparent than ever. This comes as no surprise since 2020 forced our industry to consider using various technology solutions for our businesses and for planning and executing events.

As a business owner, I was forced to take a hard look at the technology solutions I was using to help my business and evaluate — is this worth the spend? Does this enhance the efficiency of my remote team? Or does this service elevate my client experience?

As a wedding and event planner, I also had to ensure that the technology was on brand with LLG, and created a seamless transition from in person meetings, to zoom dates, and google hangouts.

Currently, I use the following free tools in my business to operate a remote team:

• Slack
• Zoom
• Trello
• Google Drive + G Suite (Google Photos + Google Calendar)

As an event planner, in order to plan and design my events, I used the same suite of tools however they served different purposes. Google drive hosted my client’s event information, proposals, and contracts. Trello organized my planning tasks, Google Sheets managed my event budgets, and All Seated designed my floor plans. Only certain information was shareable and that always varied based on the client.

In 2019, this became very messy. I was in a lot of technological debt where I was using too many applications to organize my business, my event information was spread across too many applications, my photos were a mess across Dropbox and Google Photos (more on this later), and technology became burdensome instead of efficient.

I complained to Paul about all the new problems I was facing with LLG Events and how technology was hindering my ability to plan. Additionally, we were starting to teach a new Event Management program at NYU and I wanted to keep my syllabus relevant and up-to-date with how the next generation expects to plan events. I had a feeling everything would eventually move online and that the events industry was just a short time away from a complete revolution.

By the end of 2019, Paul and I got right to work and we began our investment into EVY Planner, an event administration workspace where event planners can organize their events, clients, vendors, and put all their event information online. You can manage event budgets and payment scheduling for vendors, gain data driven insights across all your events, and use our custom task manager and timeline tool to plan your events. It’s our own technology that we used on our own clients for years.

What started out as a glorified Google spreadsheet, which was our Wedding Planning Portal, became our next business, EVY Planner.

What technology are you using in your events business? How are you planning events remotely? How are hotel event planners scheduling events? Join our Event Technology Conversation this Friday, January 29th at 1:00pm EST. We’ll be demoing EVY as well as going through an in-depth look at the various tech solutions you can use for your business and planning events in 2022.