SKEMA Digital Marketing in Tourism and Events: Bizzabo: A new all-in-one tool for Event Management

Bizzabo, originally a blog on event management and an event networking app, has managed to raise $2.5 million to upgrade its product and launch of the first Event Success Platform. The main goal was to combine all the tools used by event organizers in their duty in single holistic platform. Up until now, an event organizer could use more than seven different tools to manage all the tasks required for the event planning, that is why, after close observation and collaboration with thousands of professionals from the event industry, Bizzabo realized the need for such a holistic software. Not only does it provides event managers with the tools to create a website, manage ticket sales, launch event app and promote their event, but it increases their productivity since they don’t waste time juggling between multiple platforms. Moreover, using different tools from different vendors is not only time consuming, but also raises costs, so this unique tool would be time and money-saving.

The Event Success functionalities are the following: website and app creation for the event, ticketing system, email services, contact management system, polling system, guest check-in software, cross platform agenda, content management and revenue management. The Event Success Platform has been tried out by a exclusive group of dozens of conferences worldwide and the organizers seemed thrilled by this new product. With this unique tool, Bizzabo definitely strengthen its position within the meetings and events industry.

We find this article interesting for several reasons:

First because of the complicated aspect of the event organization, indeed more the event is large; more the organization will be difficult. Organize an event implies many things to plan: emailing campaigns, Invitation, online subscription, ticketing, evaluation, etc. We can notice that there are a lot of different things to manage. The development of the IT field has permitted to ease all the management of an event, from the beginning to the end. It has given another dimension to this field. As we can imagine, with social networks, apps, emailing campaigns… it is easier to reach people that could be concern by an event for example. All these new tools are very useful, it is a gain of time, of resources and accordingly of money. There is therefore a trend in launching new IT tools that enables to facilitate the management of the event itself, the marketing, the experience, and of the success. There are tools for each aspect of an event but imagine someone has to organize an event, and this person is not used to do so, he will have to look for each tool, to compare them, to buy some, to understand the functioning, to manage them… It should ease the managing of an event but actually it drives it even more complicated. That’s why there is a real need of a simplified and all-in one tool as it is explained in the article by Adam Parry.

It leads us to the second thing we find interesting about this article, the all-in-one tool solution. It will permit to keep the assets of each tool and eliminate the complications brought by the number of tools. It will be easier understanding the whole tool and each aspect of it, once someone has learnt to use it, he can manage the whole event without thinking of technical aspects. It is a perfect timing for this tool to come out, there has been enough time to gain expertise from the existing tools and to build an effective all-in-one tool to respond the need of event planners and organizers.

But we have to keep in mind that events are created and attended by humans, using too much IT tools to manage an event could be dangerous for several things. First it could cut all creativity from the organizers. An event is a success when it enables people to meet, to learn and above all to live something memorable. There is another aspect of the tool that looks risky for us, if the application doesn’t work for technical reasons on the D day of the event it could become a nightmare for the organizers. Indeed every aspect of the event is managed by this application.

This new tool represents for us the future of the event management and is really interesting, but we should keep in mind that it is just a tool and it will not organize the event instead of us.

Video of Bizzabo's new tool