Tell us about yourself.
The dreaded question. We all have to respond to it on a fairly frequent basis. Especially when starting a new job, like I did this week. But there’s a matching question that people on the other side of your life ask that’s essentially the flip side of the coin.
Tell us about your new company.
In the B2B world—and especially the SaaS subset—it can be difficult to explain what your company does because, by nature, no one at your company is selling their product to your Great Aunt Jean. They’re not selling to individuals at all. In fact, they’re probably selling a product most individuals have never really heard of. I’ve gotten by with simply describing Swoogo as a software company. Non-technical people frequently smile and nod, and nope themselves right out of the conversation at that point. But there are some who stick around and hear event management software. Which doesn’t really clear things up.
Event management software?
What exactly is that? I’m the Sr. Content Writer! I, of all people, should have a succinct, two-sentence answer for that. And maybe by the end of this blog post, I will.
Here’s what I knew on my first day. Swoogo is an event management platform. You know all those registration forms you fill out when you’re attending pretty much anything? Swoogo makes that easier. It gives you lots of choices and gathers data.
Not very sexy.
Luckily, Swoogo puts its employees through their paces. As a new hire, I was expected to learn the ins and outs of an event management system I might never use, or be expected to teach or troubleshoot to others. Then I had to build my own registration website and fulfill several very specific requests from a mock-customer. This is not what I’m good at.
But it was an excellent learning experience, and now I know the things I think are the best part of Swoogo.
Intuitive
My sister is a label freak. She has a very fancy-pants label maker and she prints out those little labels and slaps them on everything. (Her pantry is astonishing.) She would be overjoyed by Swoogo’s dashboard, where every choice is clearly labeled. This makes the event management software super intuitive. In fact, it begins with an event wizard that requires you to input all the bare basics before it spits you out into the more robust building platform.
Even then, the layout of the main tabs across the top takes you through the process in an order that makes sense. Left to right and top to bottom, everything in a logical sequence. You certainly don’t have to do it in that order, but if I were a first-time events manager, learning the Swoogo event management software for the first time (with an event timeline looming) I would sure be grateful for the linear process.
Work smarter not harder (or harder or harder)
I’m a multi-published novelist and when you finish drafting one book and get ready to write another one, you bring along everything you’ve learned and knowledge of your characters. But as far as actual content, you have to start with a completely empty page your next time around. Not with Swoogo.
Are you hosting a 2,000 attendee webinar every month? Great—clone your event and keep all of the work you’ve already put in. Only change the things that need to be changed.
Want to start from scratch? Do it, I guess. But you don’t have to.
In addition, if you have your monthly webinars, plus a huge yearly meetup, with twice as many people, no problem. Keep both of those events in your account and copy the one you need. I was amazed by how much of my work I would be able to keep if I were holding another (real) event. Y’all, I would definitely want so event management software.
What you see is what you get (and what you have is what you see)
Bear with me. It makes sense, I promise.
In this event management software, at any point—literally any point in the building process—you can click on the event URL and see exactly what you’ve built. And find out if it’s working. If it’s not, close the tab, fix it, click the link again, and instantly test it.
Bam. Real results, real time.
Why is this important? Because when it comes to event management and building, the list of things you’re putting into this process is very, very long. If you couldn’t check your progress along the way, then when things were inevitably a mess when you were done—because every big project is a mess the first time you ever try it—you would have no idea which tiny step sent things wrong.
Instead, multiple times an hour I checked the actual site I was building and saw the changes I was making. When I missed a step, it was obvious, and I could review my last five steps to find my mistake, instead of my last fifty. That instant conversion felt like actual magic to me.
There’s a website?
I know, I know. I should have known this. But I didn’t. I knew Swoogo did the registration forms, and that through unlimited conditional logic you could basically knock over any line of dominoes you wanted. I guess I figured you would already have an event website, and there was a Swoogo Registration widget embedded? But it’s so much better.
Guess what I have on my practice website? Pictures, a map of the location, a carousel of pretend speakers (yes, of course Keanu Reeves is totally coming to my food truck conference), a countdown, a row of sponsors, and photos of food, just because. I didn’t know I knew how to do any of that.
Well, without Swoogo’s software, I don’t.
Now that I’ve finished my training on Swoogo’s event management software, I know a lot more about it, and not only am I massively impressed, I have a good two-sentence explanation for the question my friends and family are all asking me.
Swoogo? What the heck is a Swoogo?
Swoogo is an event management platform that streamlines the organizational aspects of all sorts of events, from registration and session scheduling, all the way through post-event data reports, and it keeps that info safe until you’re ready to use it again. It helps event managers intuitively build a website perfectly specified to their needs, with embedded registration, marketing, merchandise, sponsors, analytics, and as nifty a website as they care to drag and drop, with real-time testing.
Is that two sentences? Yeah, two sentences. (Trust the writer to make two very long sentences.)
Ah well. I think my friends will be impressed.
Although, I might still need to tell my Great Aunt Jean, it’s software.