Buying vs. Building Event Management Software | Cvent

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Are you considering building your own online registration system instead of purchasing Cvent?

Below are some key points to consider based on years of experience developing a world class online event registration system.

	Internal Development	Cvent
Industry Standards	Knowing all the industry standards and best practices to implement in a registration system is a process that can take months to carefully plan and think through. Having the best business processes that meet industry expectations are critical success factors.	Since 1999, Cvent has been developed with input from thousands of event planners. All customers benefit from implementation of best practices and industry standards to increase attendance and decrease operational costs.
Event Site Selection	Developing an extensive database of venues can be time-consuming and difficult. Aside from the staff needed to maintain a database of venues, including updating hotel name changes and keeping track of new properties, simply establishing the right contacts across thousands of venues can become an overwhelming and nearly impossible task.	Cvent has invested over $25 million in the development of our comprehensive database of over 234,000 venues and event services searchable by location, total meeting space and other criteria. We have a team of over 100 employees solely focused on researching, updating and maintaining the accuracy of our database. Search the Cvent Supplier Network and submit request for proposals to multiple venues at once.
Website Development	Hiring web developers to create a custom event registration website can be expensive. Fully integrating your event website with your back-end databases to enable reporting and eliminate data entry can take time and be very expensive.	Cvent utilizes templates for a customizable event registration website that can be integrated into your existing website or expanded into a brand new website.
Email Marketing	Sending emails from your organization’s servers or a third party ISP can be very problematic due to a myriad technical of issues like: deliverability, third party black lists, filtering rate limiters, and many others. There is a minefield of problems for systems not designed and maintained for e-marketing.	Cvent’s integrated email marketing system and experienced technology staff ensure the highest delivery rates of personalized graphical or text based email invitations. Our software automatically reports open rates, click-throughs, and automatically cleans invitee lists of bad data. Finally, we provide templates to use in creating email invitations.
Onsite Event Management	Registering and/or checking attendees at onsite has never been easy. What if you need to print badges or collect payments the day of your event?	Cvent’s OnArrival check-in app revolutionizes the onsite event management platform. OnArrival allows you to check in attendees for your event or sessions, print badges, collect payments, and more.
Engaging Attendees on Social Media	Engaging your attendees onsite is a difficult task. Capturing all of the event related activity on social media is daunting, but needs to be done. How else are you going to capture and amplify the pulse of your audience?	Cvent’s SocialWall allows you to display social content in real time. You can encourage attendee interaction, amplify your event, and highlight key sponsors and partners.
Mobile Presence	Having a mobile presence is essential to an event’s success this day and age. Developing a mobile app in-house is expensive and cumbersome.	Cvent’s CrowdCompass mobile app enhances the event experience for your attendees, sponsors, speakers, staff and any other key stakeholders. Having a mobile app that integrated directly to your event management and registration system is vital.
Mobile Payments	Collecting mobile registrations and payments will require an organisation-wide effort. IT, finance, accounting, marketing and other departments must come to the table to create the internal infrastructure required to build this process. Constructing this solution internally can be time consuming on cost-prohibitive, with countless man-hours devoted to its creation and maintenance.	Cvent's mobile capabilities are already embedded in our software, providing you with the ability to process real-time registrations and payments via mobile immediately, with no additional cost. Mobile processing is included in Cvent's robust platform of services.
eCommerce	Setting up the ability to take payments online can be complicated and expensive. You will need a dedicated hosting server, SSL certificate, technical integration with payment gateways and payment processors. Setup and maintenance can be expensive.	Cvent handles all the technical aspects of payment processing and eliminates the long delays in configuration, setup and associated costs. Essentially, we collect payments and immediately puts them into your merchant account.
Reporting / Analytics	How do you prove the ROI of your events? Can you measure trends for one event or multiple events over time? Even the seemingly simple reports, such as registrant rosters, can be difficult to pull out of an in-house system.	Cvent offers you over 100 standard reports and unlimited custom reports to slice and dice your data any way you’d prefer. With executive dashboards and summary views, you can see exactly how your event is performing simply with the click of a button.
Integration	Developing a reliable web based registration system tied to both a database and to an ecommerce engine can be very tedious and expensive.	Cvent integrates with CRM, marketing automation and travel automation tools to help manage the leads and conversion to sales. Your data can be pushed and pulled from your existing databases.
Upgrades / Enhancements	Aside from initial development costs, there are substantial recurring costs of maintaining and upgrading the software and websites.	Clients benefit from multiple software upgrades and enhancements every year at no additional charge.
Hosting	Hosting a web-based system can be expensive when implemented in a secure and reliable manner. In most cases cheap web hosting solutions are not reliable or secure for e-commerce websites.	Cvent is hosted in a Tier-4 data center with world class security and server redundancy.
Customer Services	Getting the help you need when launching and promoting your event can be a challenge. Hiring additional staff or temporary staff is an expensive solution. Having good, documentation, training, and support is critical for success with most business class software systems.	Cvent’s team of experienced event planning professionals offer wide range of services covering training, support and advice to help clients get higher attendance in events.