EventCollab
Fostering Collaboration in Event Management

In the course of his two-decade-long career as an event manager, Tommy Melancon had the experience of working with numerous event management tools. A common pain point associated with most of them was the difficulty in collaborating with employees and clients spread across different geographical locations. Further, the use of emails to collaborate with teams involved in venue arrangements, audio-visual equipment providers or caterers of food and beverage, and updating relevant information on spreadsheets, made version control a challenging task. Melancon’s vision to streamline the operations using “one thought-base” to track every aspect concerning event project management, laid the foundation of EventCollab, recollects Megan Powers, the company’s marketing communications consultant. Built on a culture of trust, “EventCollab has championed the development of web applications which paves the way for seamless version control and fosters collaboration between all the teams responsible for an event’s success,” says Powers.

The thought-base envisioned by EventCollab is essentially a SaaS application built by professional event managers hosted in the secure Amazon cloud environment. Unlike emails and other modes of collaboration, EventCollab’s application features an intuitive user interface involving graphics and tour plans for users to manage their workflow. Working with the EventCollab application essentially involves specific role-based “circles” for pre-marketing, marketing, audio-visual, and so forth, for each of which collaborators are assigned.

For example, when an enterprise engages a service provider to oversee the audio-visual arrangements for an event, a dedicated audio-visual circle is created that serves as a central repository for all the related documents, discussions, and tasks. “The objective behind assigning circles is to let people see only what they need to,” adds Powers. To ensure seamless management and tracking of logistics operations during events, the company offers EventCollab Showbook—a scalable and intuitive standalone tool that features a planner, event scheduler, and custom report generating capabilities. EventCollab Showbook also offers drag-and-drop capabilities to edit schedules, thereby updating users on the changes made with regard to the logistics needed for an event.

Installation of EventCollab software is effortless, for the application is available on a SaaS basis. The software has been integrated with the Google ecosystem to allow users to leverage the capabilities of Google Drive, Google Contacts, and Google Documents. Users, therefore, have a holistic environment for preparing and uploading documents, besides generating reports in real time. The integration extends to Dropbox, OneDrive and Box as well to enable further document storage. There is also an instant chat engine that allows users to chat with one another; various decisions made can be exported into the event history log for other members in the circle to take note of. “We also have a time tracker feature built into the application to track the time in connection with the event,” adds Powers.

The collaborative environment provided by EventCollab has scripted numerous success stories. In the instance of a large enterprise that used EventCollab’s services, various circles created within the EventCollab event management application during the annual conference event streamlined and optimized the labor operations, resulting in savings of over $100,000 for the client. Powers further adds that EventCollab is being widely used by companies of all types—startups and enterprises— across a myriad of domains.

In the near future, the company intends to upgrade its event management application by building the event scheduling and other capabilities of Showbook into the EventCollab application. The constant focus on enriching the product is bound to make EventCollab a bellwether of event management technology.