Constant Contact EventSpot review by Inspector Jones

Constant Contact produces a number of products, most of which are designed to help with marketing. They have designed their Constant Contact EventSpot product to make life easier for organizers of events.

As regular event organisers know there can be quite a lot of work involved in setting up an event. Event management covers everything from the beginning of the promotion to the holding of the event and the analysis of the data afterwards. EventSpot aims to make this easier, automating as much of the process as possible.

You can create a consistent theme that covers all parts of the event process. It provides a very professional-looking package. There are 152 built-in themes, along with the ability to customise your own.

The process begins with your promotion of your event, where you can easily create fully customised invitations, complete with your logo, colors and pictures, as well as landing pages for your event. Constant Contact (whose other products focus on marketing) have also made it very easy to share your event on social networks.

EventSpot also contains built-in email, so there are many methods you can use to promote your event.

Once you have promoted your event, potential attendees can easily register for the event. Registrations are handled online, with a well-designed, easy-to-use system. Usefully, payments can also be made online as part of the registration process. You can easily keep track of registrations at any time.

If you are holding a ticketed event, you can issue your tickets directly online as well. It is easy to have different ticket levels, and thus have things like early-bird pricing. As with most other parts of the event, you can easily customise the tickets to be of your design.

There are some limitations though. It is not possible to easily create discount prices, give refunds or deal with cancellations as part of the app.

One nice feature is that you can download EventSpot as an app on your iOS or Android device, and then use it as a virtual ticket reader at the actual event itself. Indeed, you can “check-in” your registrants by name, ticket number or even by QR code scan and record them as attending. One issue to be aware of here, though is that you can’t enter any guests separately from the person who invited them - they have to be “checked off” together.

There is a useful dashboard, giving you the essential analytics and reports for your event, for instance, reigistration data, payment data, ticketing data and the like.

Constant Contact have created a tiered pricing structure for EventSpot, depending on the number of events you wish to hold. There is a 60 day free trial for a small event (of up to 10 guests).

Pricing starts at $20 per month for a single event, scaling up to $150 per month if you are a real event holder wizard, holding more than 40 events.

There are discounts of between 10% and 30% for those who pre-pay, as well as non-profit organisations. If you sell tickets remember that payment processors, such as Paypal, will also charge a fee.

Overall, Constant Contact EventSpot is a slick, well-designed, method of organising an event. For small to medium-sized events, it is probably the best product on the market. It does lack some of the capabilities needed to organise large events or conferences, however.