How to Create an Event App [The Ultimate Cheat Sheet]

If you are about to create an event app that is changing the game, you should put your focus on the global events industry trends.

Meetings are no longer the same as just a couple of years ago. Tech-savvy participants expect a client-centric approach, fresh event concepts, innovation, advanced personalization, a connected world, frictionless operations for every occasion, whereas planners gather granular data.

When you create an event app, there are plenty of nuances that you should consider. Whether it is a global forum, private event, or local workshop, an event app should cover all routines. It is literally everything—from ticketing, reminding of upcoming activities, monitoring the meeting agenda, warning of schedule changes, making purchases to networking and great community.

On top of that, we can’t but reckon with the COVID-19 outbreak. While lockdowns became the new normal, the pandemic triggered the digital turning point, thus giving one more good reason to develop an event app.

Meeting managing apps have proven to be powerful tools for delivering a better experience, engaging the audience, and optimizing forces for an event manager. This year 63% of event providers reported growth in demand for their services. The 2020 market was valued at 9.13 billion USD, and the Mordor Intelligence report reveals that the industry expects a significant increase – up to 16.71 billion USD by 2026.

If you are into event app development, this piece helps you answer the most common questions.

In today’s article, OpenGeeksLab has gathered steps to take and promising use cases to help you create an event app that will stand out. Read on.

Types of Event Management Apps

First things first, before heading towards steps on how to make an event app, you need to learn the basics.

Mobile event apps offer multiple options to manage the event program, improve attendees’ engagement, and provide a data-driven approach to decision-making. We can split event app development into two main types:

Purpose

Depending on the platform purpose, gathering apps fall into two primary business models: event aggregator sites (that cover numerous affairs organized by diverse managers or companies) and applications dedicated to a specific event.

For example, apps like Eventbrite, Attendify, or Unation allow users to choose local seminars, meetups, exhibitions, and so on. Organizers can use these apps for creating and managing their events.

Dedicated gathering apps like B.A.A. Racing App, ComicCon, Oktoberfest – The official Ap, or iBurn cover particular festivals or expos.

Scale

Depending on the meeting scale, we can drill event app development into the following options:

• Web seminars management app like Livestorm allows organizing online meetings without any limits on webinar size. Due to the pandemic starting in 2020, 65% of B2B marketers want to rearrange their budget from in-person gatherings to online events like web seminars.
• Exhibition or expo planners. For example, PackExpro helps attendees find sessions or products using floor plans with real-time notifications not to miss a thing. ExpoFp offers various interactive exhibition maps, booths, and sponsorships online. SocialTables allows managing seats or booths inside the expos space.
• Wedding or private party management apps. With platforms like WeddingHappy at hand, partners can organize the event, get notifications about its stages, and share information between involved parties. A dedicated planner app like Mint helps manage budgets. AllSeated allows organizing bars, tables, furniture, or a stage inside the gathering venue.
• Company event planner. For instance, Asana provides team calendars for managing collaboration. Wrike helps control conferences or meetings within the company.
• Festival guide apps like North Coast Festival Guide or Coachella Official allow organizing and informing participants about themed occasions and registering for the event.
• Conference planning apps. A great example of such event app development is Cvent that enables managing conferences at any scale.

Now that you know the promising solutions the niche is offering so far, reveal the perks you can get if you are about to develop an event app.

The Main Advantages for Event Organizers and Attendees

Events include attendees, planners, sponsors, partners, and speakers. Here is when gathering apps come in handy as they bring multiple advantages to all parties at their fingertips.

• Most of the expos, conferences, festivals or exhibitions bring networking opportunities, and attendees can use this benefit to find new business partners or like-minded people. A brilliant example of an event app for networking is Brella that uses AI algorithms to match attendees according to their interests.
• It makes booking a ticket, checking in, and managing time more comfortable with a tap of a finger, thus attendees’ experience becomes more pleasant.
• Applications that use engaging elements help increase attendees’ interest before an occasion even starts. Giveaways, live streams, contests, and other engaging activities help promote the gathering. Just after users register for the gathering, 94.46% of them share promotions, and 62.13% send it to friends so they can take part, too.
• To broadcast everything that is going on at the event’s Facebook or Twitter pages, affair application developers should create an event app with social media synchronization feature. It helps keep attendees involved.
• If you develop an event app, it makes sense to make a highly multifunctional tool with many elements allowing organizers to use it without switching to other apps thus saving their time. Project Bizzabo is an example of such an all-in-one platform.
• Exhibition applications allow examining results and getting real-time feedback. This complete analysis helps event planners to conclude their efforts and build a better strategy for the next expos. Adopting a conference app resulted in a positive ROI as stated 91% of event managers.
• Speakers and sponsors benefit from being promoted on the platforms. Usually, speakers get a special section with more information about them, whereas sponsors get in-app sponsorship spots.

Knowing all those benefits will help you develop an event app strategy to cover all essential needs of platform users. Now that you know the fundamentals, let us arm you with a list of features to apply while event app development.

Functional Scope for an Event Application

The functionality is the most significant success-driving factor of event app development. Here are some basic features you can add to build an event app:

Registration

To use any app users must register, so it is good to create an event app with multiple ways to sign up. For example, you can provide users with registration via email, mobile phone, or social media accounts. Signing up via social media is the fastest way to register, thus preferable for more people.

Profile

After registration, users receive access to their profiles for filling in personal data, including name, location, hobbies, or interests. An event app development company should take care of creating convenient and valuable forms to provide users with a positive experience.

Event Booking

Develop an event app where users can book a ticket with a tap of a finger using in-app payment. When attendees click a booking icon, they can select event time and location, ticket type, number of seats, and proceed to the payment section.

Listings and Categorizing

If we talk about organizers, smart lists inside an event platform help them group attendees and work with those groups. Such lists can be tied up to job title, company name, industry, events attended, and so on.

On the attendees’ side, lists help quickly find the necessary information. Also, enable categorizing and favorite features to help attendees find or sort events according to their interests.

Calendar

With a calendar at hand, users can book an event in a split second. Many popular meeting applications like Wrike, GoToWebinar, or others can be integrated with Google Calendar providing users with convenient timetable organizers.

Photos and Videos

Enabling attendees to add photos or videos of the event will help promote the occasion, thus attracting more people.

Analytics

Such metrics in an event planner software as revenue numbers, social mentions, conversion rate allow keeping track of all user activities. For example, you can see which sessions are most visited. Examining these details will help you better understand your audience and modify your marketing efforts.

Engaging Attendees

If you want your event to make a difference, you should engage with attendees on a deep level.

Almost every product has its own social media pages and uses them to create a supportive community. The Markletic report declares that 62% of online event managers use social media to increase registration flow. Therefore, use social media integration for your event mobile app development, as it naturally helps analyze user activity and provides you with useful data and valuable insights.

News Feed and Reminders

Push-notifications are a must-have in event app development for keeping the audience engaged.

Hosts can inform attendees about updates, changes, or other announcements regarding upcoming events thanks to push notifications. Besides, notifications represent an excellent opportunity to send consumers additional info like special offers, gifts, or bonuses though you should not overuse this feature, as it may turn irritating.

Push increases application engagement up to 88%. Moreover, with enabled reminders, 65% of users return to an application during 30 days.

Connection to GPS

Live maps, location search, and turn-by-turn interactive navigation are what make location-based features. Also, creating indoor navigation is a great idea.

Payments and Refunds

Integrating third-party services like PayPal, Stripe, Braintree in mobile event app development allows customers to choose the desired payment option and makes payment hassle-free. On top of that, you can provide users with a cash refund or compensation as an extra option. For example, Eventbrite gives users this opportunity and notifies them when they will be refunded.

We have mentioned above the basic elements that are enough for creating an event application. And of course, event mobile app development offers advanced functionality for custom event apps. Let’s take a closer look.

Surveying and Polling

Almost every (90%) virtual event manager uses surveys to monitor the attendees’ experience satisfying.

Polls help get instant feedback: what attendees liked the most, what they didn’t like, what they would like to be improved.

Live Streaming

You can add this feature as a premium option. Queries about streaming are on top of the list of questions in 2021; 17.2% of users ask about it. What’s more, live streaming is an excellent solution for those who bought the ticket but couldn’t come. A most common feature (75%) that event solutions companies provide is the ability to support both live and pre-recorded sessions.

Live Chat

Live communication with speakers allows attendees to ask questions, discuss the gathering, and be more involved in the occasion.

Internal Newsfeed

Internal feed helps attendees engage with other users by liking, sharing, or commenting on the app content.

QR Code and Mobile Check-in

This feature makes entry easier and faster, thus increasing engagement by over 90%.

Gamification

Polls, quests, or other interactive games increase attendees’ engagement. More than half (59%) of event managers use gamification.

Undoubtedly, the features are the primary criteria for choosing or abandoning a service, so make sure to create an event app applying them carefully and wisely.

Create an Event App: Essential Steps to Take

Now that we’re clear with the basics, let’s go down to the mobile event app development.

Analyze the App Market and Industry Trends

When you are about to start the actual development process, realize your idea’s competitive ability and potential. It may become apparent that this niche is already filled with competitors and perfect solutions during your research. Also, consider examining industry trends as they may help you find new ideas that can later turn into stunning features of your app. Analyzing competitors helps you understand how you can overcome them. Moreover, this helps find out how you can engage your potential users.

Decide on a Tech Stack

Choosing technologies influences the progress of the whole event mobile app development. Depending on your specific project, developers will use diverse technologies. Having precise product requirements makes it possible to identify a tech stack for your development. So in this step, you should sketch a list of desired features to build an event app, arrange your requirements into specifications, and let analysts and developers craft your desired app.

Take Care of UI/UX Design

An important thing that makes your platform easy to use and attractive to end-users is UI/UX design. At this stage, designers create wireframes of your future platform so to see the layout of features and overall sketch. After that, they make a prototype to see how users can interact with your solution.

Data Safety

When users interact with meeting planning software, they share a lot of sensitive data. During your conference app development, you should make data security a priority to avoid possible data leaks. Mistakes on this can lead to criminal liability or fines. Hiring an experienced development team helps handle these issues beforehand.

Testing

Quality assurance engineers work on finding and eliminating vulnerabilities and bugs. Software testing is a must for every quality software. Our QA engineers work during the whole development process so they can exclude all malfunctions, data leaks, or other errors to hand over first-class solutions to our clients.

Development

At this stage, all issues are decided, prototypes are ready, and it is time for software developers to step in. They must create a polished platform according to the client’s vision. Clients set short time frames called sprints, and engineers report on their work during each sprint. The client looks at the results and, together with the team, discusses progress and sorts out the next steps.

After that, market your app, get feedback, and improve as necessary. To make things right, it would be great if you have a professional event app development company on your side that will lead the project on the up and up,

Ways to Monetize Your Event App

Below you can discover the top five models for generating revenue from conference app development.

Freemium Model

This option allows people to use basic features, but they must pay for utilizing extended options.

Paid Model

Using this way of monetization requires a polished software solution, so it is worth the price.

Featured Listings

Provide sponsors, speakers, or exhibitors with featured placements to showcase their products on top of their listing category.

Service Fee

Another popular monetization way allows meeting app services to add fees per transaction.

Advertising

Implementing advert banners is one of the basic monetization ways. While users navigate through the app, they can see the ads.

Now that we’ve dwelled on how to develop an event app and gain profit from it, let’s discuss how long it can take.

Time And Cost of Event App Development

Evaluating expenses and time of event app development depends on a variety of factors.

To create a conference app that is simple with basic functionality, no social media integration, and no database takes from one to three months.

A medium complexity gathering app with databases, integration of APIs, and social media takes approximately from three to six months with a team of three to five engineers.

Finally, complex meeting apps building requires around six months and a stacked team of three to five developers. Such enterprise-level event platforms need an extensive database, integration of commerce needs, and high-quality graphics, so due to this range of implementations, it takes such an extended period.

The more event management software features you need, the longer it will take to develop them.

Go Get Your Event App with OpenGeeksLab

The market is open to new challenges, thus increasing the usage of novel meeting management solutions. The influence of last years’ pandemic made online gatherings even more in demand.

Now you know all nuances that may appear during event planner app development. Within this article, we’ve provided actionable insight into mobile event app development: types of meeting organizer apps, reasons to step into the event booking mobile app industry, basic and advanced features, revenue streams, as well as time and cost evaluation.

The industry market is rising now, so if you are ready to dive in, we, at OpenGeeksLab, gladly help you to create an event app. Don’t hesitate and contact us today!