Event Management Software

Planning and managing any kind of event—whether it’s a corporate Christmas party or an online webinar—requires superhuman organisation, communication and time management skills, not to mention insane attention to detail.

Event management software is supposed to make this process easier. Unfortunately, by the time you find the right tools for ticketing, creating a website, marketing the event and managing exhibitors (among a trillion other things), these tools just tend to complicate the process.

That’s where Paperform comes in. The flexibility of our SaaS platform empowers you to build your own tailored event management software—all in one place. You’ll be able to spend less time drowning in tools and more time focusing on what matters: organising the best event possible.

What Is Event Management Software?

An event management system automates and simplifies the entire event lifecycle, from initial planning and organisation through to marketing and post-event analysis.

These tools come with a backend to help manage and plan your event, alongside a customer-facing interface for attendees. The idea is that the software acts as a virtual assistant, looking after the busy work, streamlining workflows and freeing you up to concentrate on putting on a successful event.

Most event management tools provide solutions for the following processes:

• Venue sourcing & floor plans

• Content management

• Lead generation

• Event marketing

• Social media

• Event registration

• Branded landing pages

• Appointments

• Ticket sales

• Payment processing

• Attendee management

• Communication with vendors, attendees and staff

• Analytics and reporting

• Polling and surveys

  

There’s just one problem—most software only manages some of these steps. For example, one tool might look after registration, while you need another for ticketing, another for data reporting and yet another for invoicing or lead retrieval.

Seeing the point is to simplify workflows, not complicate them, this defeats the entire purpose of event management software. Each new tool is another system to learn and another dashboard to sit in front of. Plus, as most of them are competitors, it’s rare for separate tools to play nicely together.

To avoid this juggling act you need an all-in-one solution. That way you can control everything from a single interface, and leave juggling to the clowns.

How To Choose The Right Event Management Platform?

With the number of events being run every day, you’d be forgiven for thinking there are plenty of great tools to choose from. The reality is there are only a couple of players in the event software game, all of which have some glaring problems.

Take Eventbrite, for example. They’re a big name in event management, yet offer few features beyond ticket sales, event promotion and online checkout support. That’s not to say they don’t provide a fantastic service—they do—but they fall well short of offering a full-scale solution.

Even companies that do offer all-in-one platforms, like Cvent, Boomset and Bizzabo, all have shortcomings of their own. These products tend to feel rather bloated, with unintuitive interfaces and pricing that really hurts the hip pocket.

Something you’ll find across all current event management tools is a distinct lack of branding and customisation options. You want an event to be a reflection of your business, which is hard to do when attendees are met with a landing page devoid of any personality.

So, we can identify four main problems with current online event management tools:

1. Most have limited features and functionality.
2. The few all-in-one solutions are bloated and unintuitive.
3. There’s a distinct lack of customisation and branding options.
4. Premium plans are too expensive for most businesses.

What’s the answer? Sign up for a few event planning tools and hope for the best? Give up your dream of giving attendees a memorable event experience altogether? Wait for future advances in event planning software?

Nope, none of those. It’s time to use Paperform. With our simple to use platform and seamless automations, you’ll be able to build a tailored event management solution that helps you put together killer events, while also reflecting your unique brand.

Build Your Own Event Management Software With Paperform

Thanks to Paperform’s versatile tools and expansive features, you can build your own event management software in a flash. Whether you want something simple or super complex, our platform offers you a versatile, customizable experience suitable for any need.

Need a simple lead generation form to collect registrations? A way to accept online payments and issue tickets? A system to automate marketing emails and outreach? A beautiful branded landing page? Or something completely unique? We’ve got you covered.

We would have to write thousands of words if we were to show you every possible solution you can make. So in the interest of keeping things simple, in this guide, we’ll show you how you can turn a basic form into an event app, then show some notable use cases you’ll find useful.

Get Started

The first step is to sign up for a Paperform account. We offer a 14-day free trial (no credit card required), so there’s no pressure to fork out any cash upfront.

When you’ve made an account you have two options: start with a blank slate, or use one of our templates. We recommend using a template—it’s a great way to speed up the process and get familiar with how our platform works.

So head over to the Templates page. You’ll find a library of over 500 handcrafted templates, all designed by our in-house experts, with nearly 40 dedicated to event management (for general tips on building a form check out our Getting Started guide).

Create An Event Registration Form

No matter what event you’re running you’ll need a registration page for basic event information and collecting the details of your attendees. Luckily, with Paperform, you complete this process in under ten minutes.

We’ll use the Charity Registration Form as a baseline. Start off by replacing the logo with that of your own business or event. Click the ‘Fun Run’ logo and add an image of your choosing. From the contextual menu, you can adjust the positioning, add a hyperlink or just drag from the corner to resize it.

Now your logo is added, the form’s already starting to feel like yours. Now it’s time to add in any headings and text you’d like to include. This is super easy—it’s like editing a Word doc. Highlight any text you wish to replace or edit, or click anywhere on the page and just start typing.

When you highlight the text you’ll see another contextual menu that appears. This menu gives you an array of transformation options (like bold and italics) as well as the ability to add headings, bullet and numbered lists, add links and adjust the text alignment.

This is a great spot to include a catchy heading alongside some information about your event for folks visiting the page.

The best event websites include eye-catching visuals to give people an idea of what to expect. It could be anything from a picture of a previous event to a video introducing the event organizers.

To insert an image, question, video, (or HTML for Agency users), click anywhere on the page. A toolbar will appear on the left of the editor, with icons corresponding to each media type. Select what you’d like to add and follow the prompts.

Click here to find out more about page and section breaks.

Next up is adding relevant question fields to your page. Event planners need to collect different information based on the event they’re running—whether that’s basic contact details for virtual events to dietary requirements for a nonprofit fundraiser.

Paperform offers more than 20 different question types. To choose the right one for your needs, just click on the field and scroll through the dropdown menu. Here you’ll be able to view the list of field types and make your selections.

For example, for an online registration page, you’ll need basic details like the attendees’ name and date of birth, as well as an email address and contact number. There’s no limit on the number of questions you can include, so play around and feel free to include any questions you think may be relevant.

When hovering over a question field you’ll see four icons on the right of the screen. These give you additional options, allowing you to rearrange, duplicate, configure or remove a question entirely.

The Configure menu (the gear icon) gives you more power over the behaviour of your question fields. From here you can do things like change the placeholder text and set default answers, as well as set up question logic.

Question (or “conditional”) logic empowers you to adjust which fields are displayed based on the previous answers of your respondents. This means your landing page adapts in real-time, giving everyone who visits a personalised experience.

For example, in the Charity Run template, we offer a choice of three events: The Little Fun Run, The Big Fun Run, and The Color Run. With conditional logic, we can adjust what appears based on what event someone selects, like so.

To achieve this you’ll have to set up section breaks. Section breaks are used to divide content on a form into distinct sections, so they can be shown or hidden with the magic of conditional logic.

For our Charity Fun Run example, we set up three different sections based on each free event being run. Each includes a heading, a small bit of text description and an accompanying image.

By default, all of these images will display on the landing page, which we don’t want to happen. We only want them to pop up when the attendee makes the relevant selection. To set this up, we need to add a break using the “Add Break” button on the left of the editor.

Add a break above each section. Then from the “Configure” button attached to each individual break, you can set the conditions for when you would like that specific section to appear.

In our template, we have the conditions set so when Which event will you be joining is The Little Fun Run, then the appropriate information is automatically displayed. If it’s not selected, then it will just stay completely hidden to the viewer.

By using logic your event registration page adapts on the fly, allowing attendees to save time and effort, and making the registration process more intuitive and enjoyable.

Change The Look And Feel Of Your Form

Your basic registration form is up and running. It’s time to add a bit of personality. To adjust the Theme settings head to the water drop icon on the top right of the editor. This is our design hub, where you are given the tools to change everything about your page, from fonts and colours to UI elements and adding your own custom CSS.

Make your page pop with a background video or translate the entire form to multiple languages in the “Translation” tab—you’re only limited by your imagination. Spend some time playing with the options and view changes as you make them with our live Theme Preview.

Event Management Use-Cases

We’ve covered how you can use Paperform to create a registration page for your event, but that’s just scratching the surface of what you can do. Need to push data to a mobile app? Notify companies of sponsorship opportunities?

No matter what you’re trying to do, the chances are we have an integration for your needs.

Automate Attendee Outreach

When an attendee registers for your event you want to make sure they receive confirmation. But you might also want to send them things like check-in details or a reminder leading up to the big day.

Whatever your message may be, outreach is a crucial part of the planning process. Thankfully, you can automate it with our auto-submission email functionality. To get started, from the form editor, click “After Submission” > “Emails”, then select “Add Email”.

Now we need to use answer piping to determine who receives the submission email. By doing so, you can automatically send certain messages to people based on how they answered your form.

On the right of the “To” field, you’ll see an icon of three horizontal lines with a “+” sign. Click on this to bring up a dropdown menu that displays all the questions within your form. Simply select the email question field.

Our platform will now pull the email of each person who registers for your event and send them your automated message directly to their email inbox. All that’s left to do is craft the email—you can even add payment receipts, PDFs or any other form of media you want.

Manage Attendees With Our Google Sheets Integration

With our handy integrations, you can connect Paperform to your favourite applications. And with more than 1,500 Direct Integrations —as well as over 3,000 through Zapier and Integromat—it’s not hard to find a solution for all your needs.

There are few tools that compete with a simple spreadsheet when it comes to data and project management. By connecting to Google Sheets you can manage your guest list and keep track of all your attendees (as well as their vital information.)

Head over to Google Sheets and create a new sheet titled “Spreadsheet”. Then, create column titles for all the question fields you plan to have (e.g. name, email address and event category.) When that’s done head back to the Paperform form editor.

Go to “After Submission” > “Integrations & Webhooks. Under direct integrations, select Google Sheets and click “Add Row to Sheet”. Follow the prompts to connect your G-Suite account and select the spreadsheet you just created.

Those columns you previously set up will automatically be populated. The next step is to simply map the answers over to the desired columns in your spreadsheet by clicking on the icon to the right and selecting the corresponding question field.

To check everything’s working click the “Send Test” button and open up Google Sheets to make sure the data’s been sent over. Just keep in mind that there needs to be at least one submission for this to work.

Oversee Attendee Engagement With Mailchimp CRM

Communication doesn’t just end when someone registers for your event. You want to keep that relationship blossoming by interacting with your audience by sending them relevant information and marketing.

That’s where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools come in. A CRM allows you to organise and analyse customer data to better manage your relationships with them. It helps build and track customer relationships—and set up automated marketing to keep in touch.

Paperform directly integrates with Mailchimp’s CRM to make it a breeze to organise attendees and run targeted email marketing campaigns. To get started, return to the “Integrations & Webhooks” menu and click Mailchimp.

Just click the “Add Account+” button to connect your account (you’ll need to sign up first.) This will open a login page that asks you to give permission for Paperform to connect to Mailchimp. Give the all-clear and you’re good to go.

Note: if you don’t want to use Mailchimp we offer integrations with all the most popular CRM solutions, including Salesforce, Agile CRM and Streak.

Accept Payments & Sell Tickets

Now it is time to look at how we can use Paperform to begin accepting payments and streamline the registration and ticketing process.

Before you can begin accepting payments, you’ll need to connect a payment gateway. Don’t worry, Paperform offers the ability to connect a Square, Stripe, Paypal or Braintree account, so you have plenty of options.

From the form editor head to ‘Configure’ > ‘Payments’. If you don't have a payment gateway connected to your account yet, you can set one up by clicking "Manage Payment Accounts" and following the prompts.

Once you’ve connected a payment gateway we can configure Custom Pricing Rules—this gives you the ability to attribute a dynamic price to your form using logic. You can attribute calculations (=,x,-,+, etc.) and numerical pricing values that modify the total price depending on the response of your respondent.

From the bottom of the “Configure Payments” menu, you can toggle “Customer Pricing Rules” on or off, or set up specific rules.

You can also add products in Paperform with the ‘Product’ question type. Once you’ve added the question, head to the ‘Configure’ menu and customise each entry with a unique SKU, images, individual pricing and even manage stock levels.

Paperform also enables you to automatically generate PDF invoices—perfect for selling tickets to your customers and keeping track of your sales. To add a custom PDF simply go to After Submission→ Custom PDFs and click “Add PDF+”.

This opens our internal PDF designer, where you can modify the page to look exactly how you want it. Once it’s to your liking, you can set it so that these auto-generated PDFs attach to your post-submission outreach.

To attach either kind of PDF to an email you can simply select them from the "Attach Custom PDFs" dropdown in the custom email setup.

Post-Event Surveys & Polls

It’s difficult to gauge the success of an event based on word of mouth—you need concrete data and feedback to know what went well and what you may need to improve. That’s where surveys and polls come in.

With Paperform’s feedback form templates, you can create engaging forms to gather feedback and collect opinions on the performance of your event. Whether using a template or starting a form from scratch, keep in mind when collecting feedback that you want to make the process as painless as possible for your respondents.

The easiest way to do this is with the Scale field type. Respondents can then answer questions or statements in a simple, intuitive (and importantly, fast) way. You can add numbers, words, or even emojis to make it more engaging.

Another great interactive question field type is our Slider question. With this field, respondents can rate parts of your event with a flick of their finger or mouse.

Final Checklist

Before you share your form and start registering attendees, there are a few finishing touches you need to look after.

Edit the form title, description, cover image, and custom URL under “Configure” > “Details”.

1. Customize the submission page (or create a dynamic success page) under “After Submission” > “Success Pages & Redirect”.
2. Enable a payment account if you want to receive payments and sell tickets for your event under 'Configure' > 'Payments'.
3. Run a test submission to see the form in action. Click the “View” eye icon on the top right of the form editor to see a live view of your page.

Ready to share your snazzy new page with the world? Grab the URL from the “Share” menu and share it on social media channels. If you’d prefer to display the registration form on your website, just copy the relevant embed code from the same menu.

There you have it—all done. All that’s left is to get to work and start planning your killer event. If you don’t see a solution for the kind of event technology you need within this guide, just get in touch with our support team and we’ll be more than happy to help. Happy form making!