EventElephant Receive Nomination for Best Innovative Start-Up

EventElephant are proud to announce their nomination for Best Innovative Start-Up at the Digital Media Awards 2010. EventElephant has grown in leaps and bounds since its launch just a year ago and this has never been more evident than through this recent nomination.

On Thursday 25th of February 2010 the industry will assemble at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Santry to honour this year’s winners. The annual Digital Media Awards will present awards in 21 categories, to the companies, people and organisations producing the most stylish, creative and pioneering work in their field.

EventElephant were included in the nominations for being one of the most innovative and successful start-ups in Ireland with their online event registration product. EventElephant is a revolutionary product for the event sector, which makes it easy for event organisers to plan, organise and manage their events and their attendees online.

The Digital Media Awards are granted at three levels. Entries that receive the highest average score from the judges within that category are awarded the ‘Best in Industry’ Digital Media Award and will receive a personalised trophy. The remaining entries will then be judged with the top two receiving gold and silver certificates. These winners will receive a personalised certificate of achievement.

Eamon O’Brien, CEO said "We are ecstatic at our nomination and the recognition these prestigious awards give our company. It has been a great year for EventElephant and we are only getting better as this award nomination proves".

All our fingers are crossed for the ceremony in February, and we will let you know the result as soon as we do!

How to Plan and Promote Your Small Event

So you have got a good idea for an event. That’s great but how do you make it happen, and most importantly a success? Amazingly the same rules apply if you are organising an international conference for 2000 attendees, or a charity bake sale in the local church hall. The keywords you have to remember are Plan, Promote and Communicate. I will now take you through the best way to organise and promote your small event while trying to keep the budget down and attendance numbers high.


Plan
This may seem rather obvious but one of the key ingredients to a successful event is good planning. Leaving things to the last minute will always result in complications and puts all your hard work in potential jeopardy. Make sure you start organising your event in adequate time, after all you will want to let your attendees know about it as soon as possible so they can add it in to their diaries.

Once you know the logistics of the event i.e. venue, theme, capacities and guest list you need to start thinking about compiling all the information for your attendees. A great way to do this is to use an event registration website from EventElephant. This website will allow you to add all the vital information about the event such as the where’s and when’s, and crucially it will also allow people to RSVP/ buy tickets. To view an example of an event registration website click here.

You now have a launch base for the event, the next thing you need to do is promote, promote, promote.

Promote
Demanding attention will get your event noticed, and will make more people want to attend. The only way to do this is through efficient promotion. Event promotion doesn’t have to cost the world and can often be done for free by using tools that I will go through now.

Now that you have your event registration website, there are many inherent tools available within the system that will get your event off the ground. The basic first step is invitations. Choosing a method in which to invite your attendees will completely depend on the type of event you are organising. Use the email invitation functionality within the system to instantly share your event with your contacts list. This is the cheapest and easiest way to direct your attendees towards your registration website but if you decide that good old fashioned paper invitations is the way to go try using one of these MyGatsby, MyExpression or BallisticBlue.

Another great tool to use is social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Adding your event to these sites will give your event much greater visibility. It couldn’t be simpler to do and can instantly be performed from your event registration website by clicking the ‘Share This’ button. This will then send a link to all your social networking pages in one go, making the event visible to your whole networking group. This is a great tool to use if you don’t have the contact details for all of the people you would like to invite.

Communicate
Event promotion doesn’t stop after the invitations have been sent out; in fact this is where it really starts. Invitations allow people to say whether they are going to be attending or not, so your job now is to get the people who accepted excited about the event. This should be an ongoing process and should last right up until the day of the event.

You can communicate with your attendees through many channels. Make sure you add any updates to your event registration website, this will let all attendees know any new information and will keep them fully up to date. You should also be talking about your event on social networking websites, this allows people to talk back to you and in turn will build more ‘buzz’ for the event. For more information on this read my blog ‘Using Twitter Hashtags to Promote Your Event’.

This two way communication can now stretch into a multi way communication as your event attendee’s talk between themselves about the event. In doing this the event starts promoting itself as more people will hear about it, and in turn may also encourage them to sign up themselves. Make sure you keep an eye on all of these communication activities though as you will want to respond to any queries people may have about the event. A good way to do this is to use tools such as TweetDeck or Google Alerts.

These are great first steps to get you on your way to planning and promoting your new event.

Please feel to comment if you have any further suggestions.

EventElephant Christmas Offer!

It is nearly Christmas and EventElephant are getting in the mood by offering all of our Organisers a very special Christmas treat.

Are you organising the office/association/club Christmas Bash? Do you want a free website ready in minutes that colleagues can sign up on so you know who’s coming and who’s being a Christmas Humbug?

If yes, you’re in luck as from today all free to attend Christmas parties will incur no charges from EventElephant! Yes that’s right, if you add your Christmas party to EventElephant before 8PM (GMT) Monday 14th December we will happily waiver any of the ticket fees, meaning you can enjoy all of the EventElephant tools for free.

To redeem this offer simply add code EE0002/CH09 when creating your event. Be quick though, this offer will only last until 14th December.

Merry Christmas from all at EventElephant!

Make sure you follow EventElephant on Twitter for any future offers.

Winter Release- Lots of New Tools, Lots of Upgrades

Once again next week sees the launch of a new bunch of updates to the EventElephant system.

At EventElephant we’re committed to making the event organiser’s life as hassle-free as possible. That’s why we’re continually updating EventElephant. We release literally dozens of functionality enhancements every month. A nip here. A tuck there. If it makes EventElephant faster, easier, or more enjoyable to use, we’ll do it. Many of the updates we release are based on the feedback we receive from organisers themselves.

The great new functionality and tools are available for you to use from Monday 23rd November, and will make creating your registration pages and managing your event even easier! For a full list of the updates click here. Here are some of the highlights;

Email and Contact Functionality Upgrade

We now have new functionality for you to see the complete history log of all the emails you have sent to your attendees, all organised by date and time. Whether these are invitations, reminders, thank you emails or custom emails that you have built yourself.

Contact Management Feature Updates

As you know your attendees can enter their personal information when they register. If you need to edit this data, you can now do it at anytime in the ‘My Contacts’ tab. This means there will be no more duplicated contacts within your database, and you can instantly see a list of events that the contact registered for and which contact groups they belong to.

Change the Order of Your Speakers and Sessions

It is now possible to customise your ‘Speakers’ page even more with the ability to reorder the speakers. You can now place the speakers in the order that you wish them to be with great ease. On top of this you can now re-order your sessions. This is very handy if any of your session times change or are cancelled, as you no longer have to start your session programme from scratch.

Customisable Themes Now Even Easier To Use

If none of the ready made themes take your fancy for your event, you can always turn to the customisable theme where you can add your own colours and layouts. We have taken great steps to make this functionality now even easier to use. As well as the preview button we have also added in a template to show you which colour correspond to each area on your event website.

Customise Your Registration Page

If the registration page for your event website wasn’t customisable enough, we have now added extra functionality for you to re-order the customisable questions that appear on the page. This means that to send one of your customisable questions to the top of the page, it can be done with one click.

Refunds and Cancelations Upgrade

One of the most useful features within the system upgrade is that you now have the ability to not only cancel bookings, but also refund any of your attendees directly from the EventElephant system. This makes it a lot easier for you to manage all of your bookings and payments. The new bookings refund option can be found in the Bookings Management tab.

If you would like to know about future updates to the system please subscribe to the EventElephant Blog.

Using Twitter Hashtags to Promote Your Event

For those of you that use Twitter you will probably have seen the use of hashtags in tweets which precede certain subjects such as #ballonboy or #googlewave. These hashtags allow one constant stream of conversation to be grouped together and easily followed by Twitter users. Hashtags don’t only have to be used for news topics; they can also be a fantastic tool to promote your events.

It’s very simple to do, even for complete social networking novices. The first thing that you need to do is create your hashtag. The main rules with hashtags are to keep them short and memorable. For example, if you have an event called ‘London Publishing Conference’ then an example of a hashtag would be #LdnPubCon. You can call your hashtag whatever you like although you should always check that nobody else is using it, (this can be done by using Twitter Search), and should make sense in a sentence. You don’t need to register the hashtag and it can be used straight away in all of your event tweets. An example of using your event hashtag within a tweet would be;

Here are some of the great benefits to using hashtags when promoting your event through social networking.

Makes an event easy to follow
In the build up to your event, you will probably have many attendees who would like to be kept up to date with any announcements about the event. Using a hashtag in your event tweets means you will instantly alert anybody following the trend to your announcement, meaning they will always be up to date.

Build a community for your event
It is not only you that can use the hashtag when talking about your event. If you encourage your attendees to do the same thing, people can instantly see who else is talking about the event and can hopefully start a buzz. Before you know it you could have a whole community talking to each other in the build up to your event.

Starting conversations
Once your community starts to grow you can then start having conversations about the event using the event hashtag. You could post a tweet such as ‘For all attending #globalmediaday who would you like to see present the keynote? People can then respond to your question and by including the hashtag in their reply means that everybody else will be able to see their answers as well.

This doesn’t have to be limited to before the event, as many companies are also using the hashtags during an event. This allows attendees to give their opinions about your event in real time. Some events even use a screen on the stage so people can tweet their opinions during a conference for the whole audience to see, all being tracked through the hashtag!

Get a bigger audience for your event
It goes without saying that the more people that use your hashtag when talking about your event, the more people will see it and become interested in it. This is why it can be a great marketing tool. If enough people are talking about your event you can become one of Twitters ‘Top Trends’ meaning your event will show up on the Twitter homepage as one of the hottest topics.

Tracking your Hashtag
For the easiest way to track who is using your hashtag within their tweets, use a desktop application like TweetDeck or Seesmic (both are free to use).

So now go forward and use your event hashtag. Remember, you can use your hashtag across all social media channels including your blog and email, this will allow all of your attendees to recognise the hashtag as part of your event branding.

Organise Your Christmas Party with EventElephant!

If it’s your job to organise the staff Christmas party, you might be wondering where to start. It can be a daunting task making sure your Christmas party is one to remember, but EventElephant really is Santa’s little helper!
A great Christmas party is all in the preparation and planning so we have put together some useful tips to make sure you organise a night to remember.

Tip 1
If you’re a first time party organiser, the first tip is don’t panic! Once you have found your location, chosen a theme and sorted out your outfit, there are plenty of easy to use tools that will help you to keep the stress levels down. Firstly you will need to tell people about the party so use the EventElephant step by step ‘wizard’ to create a unique website for your event. You can input all the information about the party as well as designing the website to fit your theme. The wizard is very intuitive so even the least IT literate person can create a great looking event website.

Tip 2
Next you need to get the message out. In one click you can use the EventElephant invitation system to email all of your colleagues and friends to let them know about the Christmas party. You could use the standard invitations that are ready built in the system, or why not customize it to fit in with your Christmas party theme to get everybody in the mood?

Tip 3
Now that everybody knows the who, what’s, where’s and when’s, I’m guessing you will want to know who is going to attend? Fear not, as soon as your colleagues visit your event website they can RSVP to the party, giving you a clear idea of how many Christmas puddings to order! Not only that, if bosses are asking staff to make a contribution to the Christmas Party, payments can also be taken on your new event website.

Tip 4
It’s free to sign up and start using EventElephant for your Christmas party. EventElephant can also take care of all your events including meetings, networking events, exhibitions and many more.

Give it a FREE TRY right now http://www.eventelephant.com/

EventElephant receive ‘Most Investable’ Award from Dragons Den

Last week, EventElephant were awarded the ‘Most Investable’ company award from the cymypitch.ie Live event panel at Trinity College, Dublin. The cmpitch.ie award is bestowed upon the company that best demonstrates its attractiveness to venture capital funding. EventElephant were invited to deliver their 4 minute pitch against nine other companies to a panel of the most prolific investors and entrepreneurs in Ireland.

The EventElephant pitch stood out as Eamon O’Brien, CEO, demonstrated a revolutionary product for the event sector, which makes it easy for event organisers to plan, organise and manage their events and their attendees online. With EventElephant organisers can self build a registration website for specific events, promote and market the event online, sign up bookings and collect online payments, as well as monitor event progress with reporting dashboards.

‘EventElephant has managed to develop and launch a product that is not only differentiated from similar technologies available in the market, but has also succeeded in enhancing the efficiency of event attendee management’ says Eamon O’Brien. ‘The ever increasing customer portfolio of EventElephant proves that this product is needed within the market, and I am glad that the Dragons got to see the value of that today’.

About cmypitch.ie

cmypitch.ie connects entrepreneurs with investors. It is the first website in Ireland to leverage video in connecting entrepreneurs with investors. It launched on 26th June 2009 in partnership with Bank of Scotland (Ireland), Deloitte, Microsoft, The Irish Times and William Fry.