Event Management Guide

Our software tool recommendations for your consultancy

It's time to expand your Events company

Choosing the right technology tools for your business is a key aspect of building your success. They may be industry specific or hold multiple important functions you can utilise to reduce time spent on processes and boost the free time your staff have to hit their goals. We've put together a host of software tools we recommend for your industry whether you're a year into your business and looking to expand, or you've been running for 10 years and now need to make upgrades to certain processes.

When choosing your next tool we recommend considering the following points:

Does the tool have the specific features you need?
Is the tool scalable to suit your growth?
Is the tool compatible with your other software systems?
Does it handle multiple functions for your teams?
Is the price suitable for your budget?

We have not built our resources guides as review articles which compare multiple tools against each other. We have taken one or two tools we would recommend and put them forward to make your life easier as we have either carried out the research or used the tools ourselves through our clients. Of course, we recommend you perform your own research to make sure they will fit your company but our aim is to save you the leg work!

You want to keep in mind how many tools you use in your business. You may be reliant on the free plans of certain tools if you're starting out but as you begin to grow the plans may start stacking up, costing you a pretty penny. We have tried to include tools here which offer multiple functions/features for you to keep costs down. Try to keep your tech stack small if you can! It will make building your systems easier.

To visit the website of the tool we recommend, simply click the logo.

Financial

Quickbooks is a fantastic tool for consultancies to do the heavy lifting and manage your accounting needs. It has time tracking and worker management capabilities to help manage your team and keep finances in check. One of our favourite features of Quickbooks for consultancies is the ability to scale up the plans as you scale up your consultancy, offering more tools and features. You also have the ability of integrating with your banking apps and other tools to streamline processes, it's a brilliant tool! If your event company is expanding quickly and needs more functionality, we would then recommend switching to Xero which is more comprehensive.

Pricing starts from £10/month and scales up to £30/month for agencies working with suppliers and needing to manage VAT and income tax.

CRM Tools

Hubspot is one of the leading CRM platforms out there, with a vast range of capabilities and functions, albeit a portion of them are behind paywalls and different plans. For small to medium sized event consultancies we would opt for Hubspot as you can easily utilise the sales pipelines to track new deals, you can manage your contact list and attach every important document to a contact/company to keep information in one place. We would recommend using this in conjunction with Dubsado (which isn't a CRM) as a work management tool.

Pricing for Hubspot Starter plans begin at £14/month per user. We would advise going for either the Service plan or Sales plan.

Marketing

In our experience Instantly.AI is one of the best cold outreach email platforms when it comes to reaching your prospects inbox and providing a specific email workflow to introduce them to your brand. This tool will warm up each email account you set up, you can send email sequences at scale to be more effective, and easily personalise your campaigns to your prospects.

Starting at £24/month, this is a brilliant tool to start up your outbound marketing campaigns, or improve your processes on your current efforts.

Outbound marketing

Mailerlite is a fantastic program we have a lot of experience with to send out newsletters and marketing campaigns. Their campaign builder allows you full customisation of your email design make it look exactly how you need. They have their standard drag and drop editor, an AI editor, a rich-text editor and HTML editor to suit your needs. Send newsletter subscribers into a workflow and get them warmed up with automations too!

Pricing starts from £18/month on their Growing Business plan which allows up to 2,500 subscribers before requiring an upgrade in plan.

Inbound marketing

For a consultancy just looking to get content out into the world, Buffer is a leader in the industry allowing you to easily create, auto-schedule and post your content. Its minimal and clean user interface makes for a shallow learning curve and offers great reports to track your analytics across multiple social media channels. We use this ourselves and with clients and have yet to run into an issue! For the larger consultancies, we would opt for a tool such as Hootsuite.

The free plan offers 10 scheduled posts across 3 channels at a time, with paid plans starting from £5/month.

Social Media

Project Management

Trello is going to be a more suitable PM tool for the smaller to medium sized consultancies who need to easily manage budgets, track time for their projects, have an overview of who is tackling which tasks, and tracking the progress of each event. If you're using (or will use) Zoho Backstage then you may need a PM tool less, but we would still recommend Trello. We like Trello for the template creation capabilities if you host events with similar aspects, the detailed reporting function and the many different project views to suit each team member, as we often have different ways of taking in information and performing tasks.

Trello is very competitively priced with a free forever plan and a Standard plan costing £4/user per month when billed annually. These are for smaller teams, and come with less functionality. We would generally recommend going for the Premium plan for more options. This costs £8/user per month billed annually.

Contracts

Contract & work management tools are vital for your consultancy, and Dubsado is one of the best in the biz. It allows you to create projects for each customer/event which will hold your contracts, emails, documents and other related items in one place. You have easily customisable categories to configure the stages of the project and a great reporting feature to understand where time is being spent, as your team can track their time within Dubsado. One of the stand-out features is the automation workflow! There is a host of automation capabilities from prospect enquiries to sending contracts without you lifting a finger. This is why Dubsado saves so much time.

Dubsado starts from £16.50/month for up to 3 users, after this there will be additional costs for more users.

Hosting Events

Automations

Your business software stack is never complete without an automation tool, and Zapier is the pick of the bunch! We love Zapier as it allows (most) software tools to communicate with each other, making processes far smoother.

Imagine you have a prospect who signs up for your newsletter, and you want to nurture them. You can use Zapier to send the signup from your webform into your email marketing tool, send them into your CRM, and start a workflow of an email campaign to warm them up. Once they express interest, Zapier can handle your tools to get them onboarded.

It's truly great software which we recommend starting with on the Starter plan of £23.97/month because it offers multi-step automations and 750 "automations" per month.

Additional Tools

We've added some additional tools which aren't necessarily tailored for your industry, but they are widely regarded as the best options for day-to-day business functions such as messaging, security, design and more.

Whether you are working with a virtual or an in-house team, you're going to want a strong password manager which offers a high security rating to protect your passwords. Lastpass offers the ability to store passwords in customisable folders, it will generate highly secure passwords for you, and gives you the ability to share login information with a team member without giving out the password itself.

We recommend this password manager to all of our clients as it's a safe and secure method for keeping your data secure, and many people haven't considered the risks before being introduced to the tool. Starting from £3.40/user per month, it's a small price to pay for peace of mind.

Slack is a supurb messaging app to bring your team together in one application. It's easier to use than MS Teams and certainly operates better than Whatsapp for team use, but the biggest selling point is its ability to integrate with other software tools. One example is connecting it to a project management tool and automating notification messages to team members when changes are made on tickets.

While Slack does have a free plan, for smaller teams we recommend the Pro plan which is £7/user per month. This does make it a more expensive option in the market, but the capabilities more than make up for it.

Your writing is one of the foundational keys of your business, so you want to make sure it's flowing well and without errors. Grammarly is like having a wizen teacher stood behind you with a ruler, constantly peering at your spelling. The tool ensures your writing is free of spelling mistakes and grammar issues, with a surprisingly good AI module now developed with the recent push of AI technology. Grammarly runs in a host of applications meaning you'll always have the ability to check your work.

Grammarly has a great free plan to keep you in check, and for those who would be considered the team novellist, there is a paid plan of £10/month.

Canva will always be at the top of our list for web-based design work for entry and intermediate level design work for social media and documentation requirements. The templates available offer a great basis for bringing your idea to life and the design tools you have at your disposal allow for in-depth customisation.

If you have one person in your business looking after design work, we recommend the Pro subscription at £9/month, and if you have a team each adding their input to the design process you should opt for the Team plan for £100/person per year, which has a minimum of 2 people.

That concludes our list! We recommend your look into the options we've provided and see how they fit into your company based on size, budget and how experienced your team are with adopting new tools.

Should you require help setting up and running these systems, please send an enquiry in and we will set you up with a member of our team to support your business.

Miro is a fantastic visual collaboration tool tailored for innovation and creation. It provides you with a virtual whiteboard to plan, map, discuss and discover new ways of working and building your product or business processes. Whether mapping out product roadmaps, conducting brainstorming sessions, or facilitating remote team collaboration, Miro is the tool to use. You no longer have to print off a process map and hand it out to team members before a meeting, now you can all work on the same board simultaneously. We use it, and we love it!

Miro offers a free plan to get you started and feel how much better collaboration can feel. If you need more than 3 boards and more features, the Starter plan is £6.28 per user per month when billed annually. This is the plan we recommend.

Zoho Backstage is an all-in-one event management platform for in-person, hybrid or virtual events and stands out as a leader in its field. This tool is aimed at the more established event companies who are dealing with a larger number of attendees, as it has functionality for creating ticketing websites, marketing the events, communicating with attendees and analysis tools post event. If your consultancy is regularly hosting events itself, or fully managing events for a client, this is the tool we recommend. If your team is hired to fit in with the client as support for events but doesn't oversee everything, it may be more than is needed.

There is a free plan suited for the smaller consultancy allowing you to try the software out and run smaller events, with the system costing £83/month when billed annually for the next Essentials plan.