Transcript
Hi and welcome to a new eventplanner.tv and podcast episode.
As you can see: today I have no studio guest. And there's a good reason for that.
Today I want to share with you, some background information on our new event software.
Maybe, let me first start with: why did eventplanner.net launch event software? Most of you already know I did write a book, EVENTPLANNER, a few years ago.
In my book I reference Excel a lot for organizing events.
A lot of beginning and even professional event organizers are using Excel. To create callsheets, make budgets for their events and so on. And over the last few years we started to believe that there should be better and other ways to organize events. And there are in the world. There is very good event software out there. The problem with that software is: it either comes at real costs or the learning curve to start working with it is very steep. But that's why we thought software that would appeal to a broad range of event planners and comes for free would make a lot of sense. So we launched, a few months ago, our Event planner software suite. Like I mentioned before it's a free software, so everybody can use it. And it consists of several components.
The first tool we built is: Moodboards. Moodboards is a very interesting tool when you're in the beginning phase of your event. You're looking around for finding the perfect venue. You did spot some interesting entertainment and you want to keep track of all the ideas you have. Or even share those ideas with others.
So our software is built to collaborate, together with other team members, or for example if you...
Let's say you're a wedding planner and you want to organize something for a young couple. You can even give them access. So we've built Moodboards especially to allow you to gather inspiration.
It can be venues, suppliers, whatever you find on the eventplanner.net platform. It can be posts, articles we share. You can pin all of those directly on the moodboard. But it can also be stuff you find on the internet. Direct links to websites of suppliers, social media, whatever you find. You can pin it on the moodboard and share with your team. To eventually select the right suppliers for your event.
Next to Moodboards, we've also built Checklists. And Checklists is, in my opinion, one of the two most important tools we've built. Actually, it's a Kanban board. So that means that you have, on the board, several tiles with To do list items. And all those To do's you can drag them from To do into In progress and into Done.
All those To do's you can put on there yourself. If you're organizing an event. What To do's can you have? You can have: find a venue. Arrange catering. Whatever. All the things you need to do you can put in there. You can assign to people in your team or to yourself if you're working alone. So you don't forget about them. You can put target dates. So you will also get notifications when your deadline is approaching. So you really don't forget anything. And especially if you're working in a team, that's kind of important.
But what we also did is make it very easy for you to start. If you're not an experienced event planner it's very hard to come up with all the To do's you should have on your Kanban board. So what we did is: for every type of event you can organize on our platform...
Let's say I organize a wedding, a conference or a festival. Or just a teambuilding or a meeting. Whatever you select when you create the event we will prefill that list with To do's for you. Not only prefill what you should think about but also put deadlines on them, depending on your actual event date.
So, for example, if you have your event in, let's say, six months from now and we know that finding a venue should be done six months upfront, then your first deadline will be this week, for finding that venue. And finding the caterer might be four months upfront. Whatever. You get the point.
For an experienced event planner who doesn't want our prefilled checklists. When you create an event you have the option to not prefill your event. So you can start from a blank canvas. That's perfectly possible. But if you want, standard, we will prefill everything for you with relevant To do's.
If there is a To do in the list that isn't relevant for you, you can just delete it.
Next to the To do's or the Checklist as we call it, you have the Callsheets. Callsheets are for the day of your event. Where you can actually say: okay, at nine o'clock this person in my team needs to open the doors. An hour later that supplier needs to come in. And so on and so on.
The interesting part there is that, again, you can share those To do's with others in your team. And what is interesting then? If, for example, you work with a caterer. You can give that caterer access to your callsheet. He will only see the lines relevant for him or her. And by that, he has a personalized callsheet. And depending on the access rights you give them they can also suggest or even change stuff.
But that's up to you to decide: okay, who has which access. You can choose between: okay, just read access, write access or also give admin access to really change stuff.
So, we have Moodboards. We have Checklists. We have Callsheets. And on top of that we also launched, recently, Budgets.
Budgets is a tool that is, like the word says, a tool that helps you create budget for your event. Where you can say, for example: okay, my venue costs me 2.500 euros. I have catering. 50 euros per person.
I just make those numbers up. Right on the spot, here.
But you can really fill out everything for your event. And the interesting thing is: we have central parameters. Like, for example, the number of people that are coming. And if you put in a line, like for example for the catering, and you say: okay, it's 50 per person, and later on, you would change the number of people on the event level, then the budget will automatically be updated overall.
Also depending whether you're a professional organizer or not. Professional organizers will probably want to work with VAT-exclusive prices. That's possible. You can set that as a setting on the event.
But if you're organizing a wedding for yourself, you'll probably want to just see prices including VAT. That's a setting on the event itself.
If you start with organizing VAT inclusive, you can change the setting to exclusive. But then make sure to manually adjust the prices. Because you then also need to set the VAT levels. Because we will calculate VAT also for you. So you have an idea for your cashflow. That's also important. But important to remember is you can't reverse that. Once you set an event to VAT-exclusive, you can't go back. So that's something to keep in mind.
Like I mentioned before, those four tools have the capability to work on with a whole team. So we also have account management where you can add team members, give them rights. You can even decide: okay, this person can only see the moodboards but not the budget or vice versa.
If you're, for example, an event agency and you want to give access to your customer, you might want to give them access to certain tools but not the budget or something else. That's totally up to you to decide.
Like I also mentioned before; the great news is that the software is completely free. There will be a Premium version coming up. So for the users who have an eventplanner.pro account or membership, they can organize more events and they will, in the future, also get access to more advance features. But it's our promise that the main functionality will be kept available for all users, even in the free version.
Maybe to conclude with: we know the software isn't 100%, yet. We're still working on it. We're working on a lot of new features. Like, for example, we got some feedback from users who said: okay, on the To do lists we want to be able to add comments, upload files and so on. So that's, for example, something we're working on and you can expect in the next couple of weeks or months.
But there's also a lot of other feedback coming in. And I would like to invite you, if you start using our software and you come across something, where you say: oh, it would be really handy if I would have this feature or it would change my life if I could organize events with the software but that particular thing is missing, let us know. And maybe we can add it to our roadmap. We're very committed to make and create the best event software out there for you to use.
So, basically, that's what I wanted to share with you today. All about our event software. Why we created it.
You can find it on our website: eventplanner.net/eventsoftware There you find everything you need to get started.
Reach out if you have any questions or remarks. We would love to hear from you.
