Just as there is no ‘i’ in team, there is also no ‘i’ in events. Planning and executing events is centered around collaboration involving other team members, vendors, multiple speakers, A/V teams, and so on. But with so many people working on one event, you may be wondering how teams continually work to keep everything clear and organized amongst one another—this is where event planning tools and platforms can really make a difference!
One of the biggest challenges of event planning is keeping information centralized and streamlined to maximize everyone’s work loads and time. Luckily, the event planning market is saturated with many different tools for executing events. The best part? You don’t have to choose only one!
Using an assortment of tools to manage and organize your event will help your team reach new heights to deliver an elite event. Let this list be your official guide to the top 5 best tools for maximizing productivity when collaborating on an event.
1. Asana - Asana simplifies the often chaos-inducing task that is project management. This platform allows users to distribute various tasks amongst team members, assign due dates, and communicate in real-time about the status of a project. Gone are the days of tracking your team’s assignments in excel, wondering when your team member plans to finish a task, or what the most up to date status is.
2. Notion - Similar to Asana, Notion is a fully customizable platform that teams can utilize to keep meeting notes in a centralized location, plan goals, and share across multiple groups so that everyone stays in the loop.
Pro tip: Working from the car or airport? Notion has a mobile app that you can download on your phone or tablet so you can stay up to date on the go.
3. Google Workspace - It might be obvious, but this tool really has everything your team needs to collaborate in one place. Email, shared calendars and documents, presentation templates, instant messaging, and video conferencing, all in one platform that couldn’t be simpler to use. Google Workspace allows users to see document edits in real-time so you can stay up to date with your team, no matter where they are located. It’s the perfect tool for speakers to collaborate on session slides, as well as panelists to collaborate on a session outline or prep doc. Plus, the different levels of access make it easy to restrict certain groups of people when necessary.
4. Airtable - Need a central place to store and organize your past event venues for quick reference? Airtable is your newest friend. This platform allows you to create easy-to-use databases for venues, speakers, vendors, or anything else you might want to keep track of for your event. It allows you to tag teammates, leave notes on entries, and create forms where information can be pulled into a database if needed. Pivot away from singular spreadsheets and let Airtable simplify information-sharing.
5. Loom - Loom is the tool to demonstrate to speakers and/or attendees the process of using any virtual event platform. Instead of scheduling multiple calls with speakers to share your screen and instruct them how to login, you can utilize Loom’s tools to record yourself walking through the steps. Loom records your voice (with or without video) and is the perfect solution not only for tutorial videos, but demos as well. You can share the recording with multiple people as well as save the recordings for future use.
It’s no secret that collaborating with vendors, designers, and multiple speakers can quickly become a disorganized mess if your team doesn’t have the right tools in place. To streamline your collaboration and set your team up for success, utilize the platforms above and test out the array of technology available in the events space to find what works best for you. Once you start using tools like these, you’ll wonder how you ever survived without them!
Not sure where to start? We can help!