Aventri

Kommentare: TEDxSydney is a one day event, with a complicated ticketing/purchasing process and many categories of attendees. In the past, we have managed this complexity via a combination of spreadsheets and home-grown databases, which has often resulted in loss of information or registrants on the day, as well as created challenges with reconciling multiple lists of registrants. We used etouches for our event this year, and it made such a difference to have one source of truth for all our registrations, payments and refunds, and to allow us to have an easy and quick snapshot of all our attendees at our fingertips.

Vorteile: I enjoyed having a one-stop shop for all our registrations and the super-flexible configuration capability that handled most of our complex needs. We were able to accommodate all of the attendee categories with the variety of set-up options within eReg. I also liked the ability to link events to mailing lists in eMarketing, which we only really scratched the surface with this year. Next year, we plan to integrate them together even more. We also really benefitted from the ability to print badges for the event on the day directly from etouches. Again, we did not use this to its full potential this year, so looking forward to utilising the software even more in this area next year.

Nachteile: One big challenge we had was the requirement to have at least one public category of attendee that, apparently, cannot be sold out. There had to be an option for people to select when they went to register. Our event is not a public event and purchases/registrations are by invite only, but invitations sometimes went out to more people than we had tickets available for or, alternatively, had an expiry date set for them. If these categories hit capacity or expired, there was no clean way to display a simple unavailable or sold out message without offering another public option. While the software is very customisable, this flexibility does come with some downsides. There are a number of different areas/screens we had to remember to change and update if we added new categories. This was probably made more difficult by the fact that we had a lot of categories, but it did mean that a few categories did not get set-up correctly because we missed one of these many steps.

Kommentare: Kellen has partnered with etouches since 2012. We have seen the company grow & prosper, and we are very pleased with the results. Top successes include continued ease of use, great customer support, good online learning, useful API, great integration between modules, great onsite experience. Some of the challenges include lack of development of the online booth sales & management module (ebooth), slow development of integration with association management systems (AMSs, such as NetForum, YourMembership, i4a...), limited scope of the appointment-scheduling module (esocial). We have used other systems, and for an all-around event management solution, or just as a registration management tool, we feel etouches can't be outdone. We feel we've been part of their development, through sharing challenges and helping design solutions. They've come a long way with their Call for Abstracts module (eselect), and we provided a lot of feedback on that in the early stages. We use ehome quite often, and it's very easy to learn & use, in support of the ereg module. We do not use the task management or budgeting solutions. We have used both emarketing and escan successfully. Their customer service department is responsive, and we are happy to report that senior management is also very responsive to inquiries (when we feel more urgency is required). We process around 10,000 registrations, plus 1000 eselect uses, annually. We chose etouches based on projected ROI and have not been disappointed. We also appreciate and utilize the system's ability to work with multiple currencies, multiple global payment gateways, and multiple languages, including Chinese.