Not Enough Staff for a Conference? No Problem!

Lack of budget to hire extra help is a very relatable problem many conference organizers experience. The majority of the budget usually goes into booking venues and amenities then having them set up, securing a good caterer, hiring hosts, speakers, and entertainments, and last but certainly not least, marketing and promotion. Between all that's just been listed, your budget will be stretched thin and you won't have the luxury to hire your conference planning and organizing dream team. Luckily, with event management softwares, this shouldn't be a problem and here's why.

With the advent of technology, several event management softwares have been developed to help conference organizers automate a vast number of their tedious tasks. Besides offering convenience, event management softwares have been proven to save time, cut costs as well as the hard efforts and labor usually needed to put a conference together. In more details, event management softwares can effectively replace the staff you'd usually need to:

• Collect registrations, payments and more

Several conference management softwares available on the market offer an all-in-one, customizable registration form through which conference organizers can collect any information they need from their participants, as well as payments and documents where necessary. This feature alone saves conference organizers plenty of time and taxing manual labor. All you need to do is create a registration form then share the link to it with all of your potential attendees. They'll be doing the registration and making payments on their own while you can focus on other activities.

Event management softwares also help you manage and control your registration quota in an automated manner, as opposed to having staff to assume the task of concurrently crosschecking the number of your current participants against the participation quota your conference allows; conference management softwares systematically keep track of your participants' information and alert you when your conference registration is at capacity – all in a clear and swift manner.

• Market and promote your conference

Long before a conference starts, conference organizers usually need to assemble a team of at least 2-3 people to handle the marketing and promotion of your conference. This is an important task that's usually tedious but isn't at all with an conference management software. Be it to send invitations and marketing emails or to notify participants with last minute changes pertaining to the conference, several conference management softwares offer a selection of email templates to their users as well as the ability to customize them and have them ready for automatic dissemination at the time and day of their choosing. Advanced softwares also offer their users the ability to send push notifications to their participants' mobile devices for speedy communication – a feat conference organizers have long struggled with due to the almost impossible nature of communicating last minute updates with hundreds, if not thousands of participants.

• Generate invoices, letters, reports and more

Without the help of an event management software, the task of generating documents like invoices, letters, and reports is particularly taxing as you usually need staff to create them one by one. With advanced tools offered by event management softwares, all of the above documents are autogenerated within seconds and are available for instant viewing or dissemination.

• Manage your onsite operations

You can finally ditch that massive spreadsheet of attendee names that you manually crosscheck at those long registration counters; as a matter of fact, ditch those long, overstaffed registration counters too. With an event managing 'mobile app' that's downloaded on a phone or a tablet, participants can easily check themselves in by scanning their QR codes or typing in their ID. If you invest in badge-printing technology, printing hardware can also be integrated with the process of participant 'self-check-in' s they're able to print their badges on their own. Seeing as the software does everything for you, all you need to do is relax, put a smile on and greet your guests at the door.

For more information on how event management software can help you in optimizing your event management experience whilst not breaking the bank, check out MeetingHand, our customizable and user-friendly platform.