As the pandemic has prevented most large events from taking place and put more strain on planners than ever before, many events have trended towards smaller gatherings. These smaller, more straightforward events represent an increasingly important market that many existing event platforms may have previously been missing out on but are beginning to recognize and support.
“We want event planners and professionals to be able to run every event in their portfolio on our platform,” says Steve Yellen, VP of Product Strategy at Aventri, which recently launched its Express Events solution to simplify the planning of smaller and/or straightforward events — whether virtual, hybrid, or in-person.
The need for a solution of this kind has become apparent during the pandemic, as many organizations are hesitant to commit to their larger, more complex events in the current climate of uncertainty. “Instead, they’re hosting smaller events with smaller investments that would be easy to pivot or cancel, if necessary,” notes Yellen.
Another impact of the pandemic has been that many event management teams have been scaled back, and in many cases smaller events have become the responsibility of nonprofessional planners such as administrative assistants.
“Express Events lets organizations handle more basic events more effectively, and it also opens up the platform to a different type of a user: infrequent planners,” explains Yellen. “These nonprofessional planners may not use a system like Aventri throughout the whole year.”
A solution like Express Events, however, empowers anyone who may be planning an event to access the system and easily create their event, even if they are unfamiliar with more robust EMS platforms. And while the goal is to enable relatively straightforward events, the tool also allows planners to organize more sophisticated events than they would on a standard internal comms tool like Zoom or Webex.
“I think there's a difference between an event and a meeting,” says Yellen. “Zoom, for example, is a meeting platform at its core, whereas we see ourselves focusing more on events. Express Events can do more and is geared towards events that have a bit more value than a standard Zoom meeting.”
Platforms like Aventri aiming to consolidate event portfolios on one system also benefits organizations when it comes to data collection and visibility, which has been another important conversation within the events industry following the rise of virtual events.
“By managing all of their events in the same system, organizations can really do a better job of measuring ROI,” notes Yellen. “They can consolidate their data, get unified reporting, and improve on things like training time and cost. In some cases, they may have been using two different systems, or a combination of a professional event management system and something like Excel, which made aggregating data much more complex.”
As part of Aventri, Express Events adheres to its parent platform’s privacy policy, which leaves data ownership in the hands of event planners. “With all the changes that have happened in the industry, understanding how secure your data is and how that data can be used is very important,” says Yellen, emphasizing that Aventri simply processes and does not control any of its user data.
While the future remains impossible to predict, “people are looking to be more agile with the way they run their meetings and events,” says Yellen. “This means being able to pivot from a hybrid event to a virtual event, or having more small events, rather than large, highly produced events where people make large commitments. This need to be more agile and more flexible is something that we think Express Events can address head on.”