Whova

"Whova for a Virtual Event Win!"

Kommentare: With six weeks to go for a virtual 4-day conference, Whova met all the requirements we were looking for in a virtual conference experience for both the organization and the attendees. The price point was ideal for a small organization, and their a la cart pricing helps keep within any budget. It was a very successful event for the organization and discussion is to have some virtual option moving forward, even if we still hold an in-person event.

Vorteile: A Small non-profit I work with moved their in-person event to virtual event for 2020. With 6 weeks until the event start in September, a decision was made to move it to a more robust option allowing for sponsor interaction. Whova came through for us in many ways - financially, user-friendly for both back end and attendee end, integration with already existing registration platform - RegFox, Zoom interface, meeting rooms, session surveys and robust reporting. Any issues we had and sent support emails were addressed in a timely manner. They offer several help documents and videos to walk you through various set-up and troubleshooting.

Nachteile: Be aware that Whova has their own drip-campaign of emails they send to those attending your event. We were not aware of these prior to them sending, and it cause a bit of confusion and frustration on our end. We are not able to see in advance nor edit those emails, which also contained information not pertinent to our virtual event. We did address this with our sales person in our post-event meeting, and this is an issue they are aware of and addressing.

"A must have tool for event organisers"

Kommentare: The app is optimized for business events (were no abstract handling is required), however, we used it successfully to manage our attendees in a small scientific conference. We loved checking in our attendees ultra-fast, posting last-minute changes and useful information in the app and share event photos. It helped a lot in creating the name badges (maybe could consider a certificate feature according to the registration category as well?). As organizers, we would prefer a bit more flexibility and one cost for all the features, however, all of our participants loved the application and we received very positive feedback from them

Vorteile: The QR code attendee check-in is probably the highlight of Whova's features. It checks in the attendees a matter of seconds, skipping the long lines in the registration counters. The updated version of Whova includes features that can be used directly to the event's website (e.g. Agenda webpage). Great customer service experience with online training on how to use the app.

Nachteile: Several features require in-app purchases and purchases per-use (e.g the paid tickets or the sponsors' features). This may be a struggle for small events (less than 500 participants) who need to have an idea of the overall cost in advance. As a customer, I would greatly appreciate the flexibility to rename and create new or delete categories in all the fields of the event content, as well as flexibility to include the same person under two or three attendee categories (organizers, volunteers, speaker, secretariat) as the posts are normally shared among a small group of people who assist in the organization. Lastly, even though it is helpful attendees to register via facebook many of them use nicknames which ends up printing wrong badges. I have not used the app as an attendee, so I suggest to offer an option to register via LinkedIn, Academia or other professional websites, inform that the name used should be the same one used during registration and that will be printed in the name badge requesting their approval.

"Nice features but unreliable. Do not use for critical applications."

Kommentare: Pretty horrible if you have to explain an audience of 1000+ people that the app was down for >1.5 hours mid-conference.

Vorteile: Nice features, admin interface relatively user-friendly, user-interface very user-friendly.

Nachteile: I used it for a large virtual conference (1000+ attendees, up to 10+ parallel sessions), and it was down for >1.5 hours. Extremely embarrassing and impossible to recover from it. Medium impact weakness is that the interface is not very responsive (i.e. slow). Minor impact (but nonetheless frustrating) weakness is that the admin interface is buggy (or has 'quirks' like they call it themselves). From lots of things we could notice this is not a company built on solid software engineering (e.g. they use "FirstName LastName" as the 'key' to identify attendees, and some of the admin features behave in a very illogical and unexpected manner).

"Attending Seminars in 21st Century"

Kommentare: The cost of attending conferences can be staggering. Not only for registration but travel and staying
at the conference. Using Whova to organize the conference allows the attendees much more freedom and ease in attending and tracking where you need to be.

Vorteile: Whova is a wonderful addition for any conference. I first used Whova in 2018 while attending RTUC in
Las Vegas. As you can imagine, this is an enormous place with lots of things to do for a first time visitor.
Whova let me organize my agenda, set up meetings and after hours get togethers, all in one place. I loved being able to look in one place to find what was coming up. This year our conference was done online only. The usual get togethers and lunches were missing but Whova still made it personal. We had pictures, messages, events, question and answers from sessions and even a leader board to show who was doing the best. I would love to attend future events online as long as Whova is a part of them. You truly have a very easy to use and appealing app. Thank you for making attending yearly Conferences more enjoyable even during the Pandemic.

Nachteile: I don't really have any complaints. I think Whova has a very appealing look and very user friendly

"If you have Whova Conference is very easy and effective!"

Vorteile: This app helped me a lot in the meeting. The best meeting app I've seen so far. I liked being able to easily create calendars, connect with people, scan business cards. It was VERY helpful to have photos of people also in the participants section. I managed to connect with many people with this simple plugin. Actually, I still use it to connect with people! Whova has significantly changed my experience at the conference and I will always strongly recommend this to anyone attending a conference.

Nachteile: I only think good things about this software, I haven't had a bad experience.