Debunking the Myth of All-in-One Event Management Software with Lindsay Martin-Bilbrey

We recently spoke to Lindsay Martin-Bilbrey, CEO at Nifty Method, about the concept of all-in-one event management platform. We talked about why this concept is flawed and what approach tech providers and event planners can take. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation with Lindsay where she debunks the myth of all-in-one event tech. 

Technology has become more and more part of the event planning landscape, whether to manage registration, event agenda, abstract, AV team, food and beverage, and more… While event planners are eager to find a tech solution that can do everything under one roof, the reality is much different. There has never been a platform that could truly fit all of these moving pieces together. 

As Lindsay shared, event tech platforms begin by creating one really great piece of software that solves one really big problem. If they can do that really well and without bugs, they can then help solve another problem. 

So, building a solution that can navigate from procurement to abstract management, food and beverage, registration, and more is something hard to come by. Lindsay even questions if that’s ever going to happen. 

What drives the need for all-in-one solutions?

In our recent LinkedIn Live, Lindsay shared three main influencers in the drive for all-in-one solutions:

Price

Planners are often solving for price. It’s easier to buy in volume with everything under one roof because then you can negotiate. You can check 15 things off your checklist, and that’s going to lead to money savings. 

Procurement

When you look at it from the enterprise perspective, those brands are managing a lot of moving pieces: procurement wants it to be simple. They’ve already signed and had the security teams jump through a lot of hoops. So that price and procurement run hand in hand. 

Simplicity

It is not uncommon for things to go completely wrong on the day of the event. If you only use one platform on a virtual or hybrid event and that platform breaks, that’s scary. But it’s also just one vendor to deal with.

How to build the perfect event tech stack

It always comes down to the event goals. What are you trying to do and solve for your attendees, exhibitors, sponsors? At Nifty Method, the event’s team uses what they call the Event Tech Maturity Sheet (you can download yours free here). 

In this requirements gathering document, you are able to break down the different elements of actually managing the event so that you have the answers to what you need before talking to a vendor and so that the vendor can understand what your desired tech stack looks like. 

Questions you may add to your requirements gathering phase:

• What do you have? 
• What do you need? 
• What’s important to you? 
• What’s good to have?
• What’s a must-have?

In this process, you need to think about all stakeholders (including attendees, sponsors, exhibitors, leadership, and others), the goals for each of them, and how you intend to achieve those goals. 

Just as you would plan with an in-person event, going from one room into another and having space and time to interact with people in the hallway, you need to have that same approach in a virtual scenario. What specific things would you like to happen to achieve those goals? You can add that to your requirements gathering document also.

What a foundational platform looks like?

The event management platform is really just one of the things in the grand scheme of planning the actual event. The platform you choose will depend largely on the type of event you manage and its specific requirements, be it a large trade show, an incentive trip, a traditional annual conference or user conference, etc. 

When shopping for that foundational solution, I think I would turn some of that question back around and challenge the sales teams at the event platforms to reverse engineer. As planners, we don’t know what we need, we know what our needs are, and those things don’t necessarily translate well.

So the baseline lies in the vendor’s sandbox to develop and build a one-sheet or a capability deck that those of us doing research can go and check. That’s why the Event Tech Bible is so great for event apps. Then we can go to the peer network to learn more about those vendors – Do we like these people? Are they good? Will they be kind to us? Are they affordable? 

An event tech horror story

I think it would be a user conference we did last fall. We’ve chosen a platform that did probably 98% of everything we needed. And then the platform went dark for our livestream audience. 

The issue was coming from the vendor’s servers. It’s like Marriot was open, but no one could get in the doors and you had everything inside. We have decided to almost build the entire first day in Vimeo, and to tell the 9,000 attendees online that we had to move from one platform to another. 

This is a great example of putting all of our eggs in one basket, all of our networking was there, together with sponsorship, partnership agreements, the actual presentations with the exception of this small audience we had at the program site. 

That is the single scariest example of how it’s been over the last year, not having a backup, because even when you test it, it can still go wrong. I wish many of the tech platforms could allow us to copy and paste the event into one of our instances and move it into a backup platform in case it goes awry.

As an agency response to that, when we work with a client to set an event up, we build a second backup on a second platform entirely, so we’re not dependent on somebody else’s servers. 

I’m not the only one with this kind of story. There are lots of people who’ve had that on a number of different platforms. This is not platform-specific, sometimes the internet goes down. Sometimes it’s raining really hard. Sometimes there’s a hurricane. And just like you would have a backup plan when there’s the hurricane in Miami and you need to go north to Tampa, you should be able to do the same for a virtual experience.

Walk-though a requirements gathering process with Lindsay Martin-Bilbrey

To dive deeper into the discovery process Lindsay uses with her clients at Nifty Method, she showed us how she uses the event Tech Maturity Sheet and the requirements gathering. Watch the clip below to hear from Lindsay. Video player

Conclusion

Rather than seeking the mythical all-in-one event management platform, the way to go instead is to choose foundational tech platforms that can cover 60-70% of the needs of your event portfolio, and then seek out additional event management tools to complement it. You can use these dedicated tools to cover more specific aspects of your event like networking and audience response. 

And to future-proof your events, it’s crucial that you take a few steps back. Evaluate your event goals and the experience you’re looking to deliver to your guests before committing to event management platform. In other words, you need to think from a design-first perspective. Here’s another article to dive deeper into this concept and to help you choose the best event management platform for your needs. You can watch the full conversation with Lindsay here.