The amount of affordable, innovative, productivity tools around these days is amazing, but the luxury of so much choice can be quite overwhelming too which can make or break an event planners productivity level just when they need it to be at its best.
Juggling so many tasks can be daunting and lead to a lot of stress. As an event planner, you always are aiming to become more efficient and productive, as this is the key to your success.
One way or another, the right tools with the right planning will help you get more jobs done in less time (also check out this post on the Best Time Management Apps for 2017).
Here are 21 productivity tools to help you, because when you have more time on your hands, you can achieve more and this is what truly pushes your events to new levels of amazeballs!
1. Coschedule
Do you find yourself rushing to get updates and posts published on your event website and blog? Using an editorial calendar like CoSchedule for example can help you to publish updates and posts in a timely manner by eliminating the tedious process of manual scheduling. Create the perfect social sharing plan, fine tune your messages for maximum engagement, and apply your reusable template to any content or social media campaign.
Our favourite part is the ReQueue functionality which allows you to re-promote your evergreen content. Set your messages on autopilot and consistently re-share your best content to drive traffic and engagement to your site.
It’s so well designed and intuitive that its allowed our tiny team to reach millions of readers in the last year as it allows us more time to research, write and generally do more but more importantly, it also allows you to be ensure your readers are constantly getting (relevant) updates without fail. We honestly couldn’t live without it here at InAnyEvent London which is why we’ve put it at number 1.
2. Buffer
Social media marketing has been the ‘next big thing’ in event marketing for what feels like forever now. Regardless the size of your event, you have to engage on social platforms and this is where Buffer helps you to improve your productivity level. You can schedule social media updates and perform serious analytics with Buffer. This makes building up your the promotion of your event brand on social media extremely easy.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a powerful alternative to Buffer, and is our favourite here at InAnyEvent London. However, Hootsuite works slightly different from its competitors. Aside from scheduling and analytics, Hootsuite helps to increase productivity by having the social listening feature. You can listen and engage with customers while understand the strategies taken by your competitors.
4. Trello
Working with a team and want to delegate tasks efficiently? Trello allows you to do so — and in style! The thing that makes Trello a powerful productivity tool is that it allows you to drag and drop between projects (or also known as boards). You can create checklists, images and texts to take productivity to the next level. It comes with a free account and you can subscribe for paid ones for more features.
5. Evernote
Evernote is probably one of the best (and popular) productivity tools for event planners. It allows you to upload images, voice memos, texts, reminders and chat with your colleagues for team collaboration. What makes it really useful is the offline feature where you can access the notes anytime of the day from any mobile devices. Just like Trello, there are both free and paid accounts with different features.
6. Clear
This is an iPhone app and it does one thing (and only one thing) brilliantly. It helps you to get organised and ensure that tasks are completed in a timely matter. Clear allows you to add new tasks and reminders in under a few seconds. Simple actions such as swiping the tasks left and right opens up more options such as delete the task or marking the task as complete.
7. Any.Do
Another powerful task management app on smartphones. It integrates perfectly on computers too and the one thing that makes it stand out from the rest would be the ‘morning notifications’. For example, when you set your day start at 9am, Any.Do will send you a reminder on tasks that need to be completed on the same day. You can snooze, change dates or even set the tasks as complete. And the best part, it is free to download as well as paid plans.
8. Asana
Looking for productivity tools to help your team with task management? Asana is a free project-management tool that allows teams to communicate without email, in one central location. Trust me, you can’t ask for more than this!
9. Fiverr
Event planners are always chasing for more time because as we all know 24 hours just isn’t enough. Fiverr is a marketplace to find for nearly everything and true to their name, the starting rate is $5 per gig (or around £3.50 here in the UK). If you are on a shoestring budget, you may want to consider getting a few gigs from Fiverr.
10. Elance
If you require a freelancer on a long-term large-scale event/project, Elance is the answer. You can search for thousands of freelancers with different capabilities and price ranges. Personally, we love using Elance to find Marketing and Events Assistants. The concept is pretty simple; you act as the employer and you post a project. Freelancers from all around the world will bid for the project and you can select them based on experience, price range etc. Payment could be done by milestones or after completing the project.
11. Talkwalker
Consider Talkwalker as a newer, more advanced version of Google Alerts. It offers more comprehensive results and more options that allow you to check for mentions of your event online. This helps with public relations and the chance to interact with people who are discussing your event brand online.
12. Dropbox
As we are sure you already know, Dropbox allows you to share files with others, sync files across devices and ensuring your files are constantly accessible (while safe) in the cloud.
As an events agency who need access to files whilst on the move all the time, we recently tried out the Dropbox Business options, and as expected it is a great productivity tool. It even allows you to share important files with your colleagues, freelancers, clients, suppliers or anyone who may need to upload an invoice to your accounts department or download a file to print without needing to send an email attachment or using hard copies.
13. Google Drive
Once again, like with DropBox we are sure you already know about Google Drive too, but the release of Chromebooks and the ability to convert and edit Microsoft Office documents makes Google Drive a contender on our list of productivity tools. Although it is also a great way to collaborate and share documents with your colleagues, freelancers, clients, suppliers etc. we feel that DropBox just outperforms the Google Drive on space and ease of use with a much simpler interface.
14. Eventbrite
This one goes without saying we are pretty sure there isn’t an event planner alive who doesn’t know what Eventbrite is but just in case, here are our thoughts: Are you looking for the latest networking event in town? Head over to Eventbrite and discover tickets for small to medium size events at reasonable prices. EventBrite also allows you to create and host your own events, manage ticket sales, take payments and further promote your event brand – basically awesome!
15. Meetup
Looking for bigger events to join and EventBrite isn’t capable to provide such resources? Meetup is the tool for you. It is a super effective way to find influencers, local events and networking groups in just a few clicks of the button.
16. Rainmaker Platform
Do you work within a small team, are freelance or are just starting your own events start-up business? If any of these apply then you will need something like an all-in-one marketing platform, drum roll please…
We would like to introduce you to the Rainmaker Platform, a complete marketing platform that allows you to build your own marketing and sales platform all under one roof. From superior web hosting to marketing tools, the Rainmaker Platform takes your marketing and productivity level from A to A+ in just a few clicks.
17. Mailchimp
With email marketing making a revival comeback (even though it never really left in the events industry), email marketing if honed and used correctly is a great productivity tool. We use MailChimp as our email-marketing provider and with it we create multiple follow up emails and broadcast emails to be delivered at the right time — every week. MailChimp is set to send out welcome emails for new subscribers and specific emails for those who have completed several tasks, clicking on links, opening emails etc. It’s the best thing that’s happened to email marketing since it was first invented.
18. IFTTT
IFTTT is the short form for IF This, Then That. Basically it allows you to create automated tasks to speed up your productivity level. One of our favourite and most utilized productivity hacks using IFTTT is when we tag ‘tasks’ to a post to Pocket app, it will automatically trigger an action, which will add the title and details of the post to your Evernote notebook, entitled, Follow Up Tasks. Instead of manually saving the information on Evernote, IFTTT does it for us and it saves up a lot of time. At the moment, there are over 50 different actions and triggers to customise your automation.
19. Toggl
Toggl is a simple time tracker tool – just click the Toggl button and your timer begins! It’s a super simple, super easy way to track the time it takes to complete various tasks. Toggl also lets you look at reports and see how much time you spent on different projects throughout the week – what event planner doesn’t like a little competition, even if it is with themselves?
20. Audible / Kindle Unlimited
Although not specifically targeted as a productivity tool, we do feel that this is one indirectly. Most event planners need to give themselves a little time out so that the day doesn’t get too intense; especially during an event. Listening to an audio version of a book is always an awesome way to give your mind a break whilst still doing something useful. After all it is a book so why not listen to those eBooks on trends etc. you haven’t had the time to catch up on and thus increasing your productivity level. With both Amazon Kindle and Audible, you can listen to several audio books each month.
21. Social Media Platforms
Lastly, and we know this isn’t really a tool per say, but believe it or not; social media platforms are a great source of productivity hacks. For example, spending sometime on Twitter or Pinterest would give you a couple of ideas for your upcoming project. Plus, with social media being live 24-7, you know that you are going to get the latest trends — every single time.
