As the Director of Accounts at Splash, my job is to help our clients realize their event marketing dreams. And when I get to help people succeed at the stuff they love with a product I love, it’s a double win.
But every now and then, I come across a new client who has decided they’d rather build an event management tool in-house. Usually that results in devoting six to 12 months to scoping, designing, building, and testing a custom product that, frankly, solves a lot of problems we focus on at Splash.
Sometimes building a platform internally is a great success. Other times it’s like one of those hidden icy potholes on the sidewalk: A huge, cold headache.
We think Splash is pretty great, but just in case you need some convincing, here are the eight upsides to using our product versus building one of your own:
Even if you build the perfect in-house tool, custom fit to your company’s ultra unique needs and extremely specific customers (yes, we know—you’re a snowflake!), it’s only after you launch that you find out if your product will be a success.
But when the development resources assigned to your project are reallocated to new work, you might be high and dry when it comes to fixing bugs and managing server issues.
With Splash, we’re not just here to click the green button. Our teams are working on making our product better, cooler, and more useful every day. That means you get full-time support on every issue, so you can focus on the event, and not on the event tool.
Event marketing is kind of our thing. We’ve been doing it for five years now and we’ve invested millions in building the coolest, smartest, most-intuitive platform out there. We are designers, developers, marketers, event planners, customer success specialists, sales experts, UX gurus, web wizards, beat boxers, break dancers, world travelers, and all-around professional party people.
Smart and agile event marketing makes us super happy and we spend all day thinking about it. When you use Splash, you don’t just get our software, you get all of us.
More than 250,000 of the world’s leading experts in events, design, community and analytics have used Splash over the last few years. And we have built a super flexible event tool thanks to their feedback.
Now we have daily, weekly, and quarterly releases of brand new stuff. (Like our Salesforce integration. And our GIPHY integration.)
Being a part of the Splash network doesn’t just mean your needs get met. It means you also get access to the cool features other clients (like your competition) are demanding, too.
Another issue with in-house builds: knowledge silos. When only a small team knows how to operate your software or holds the keys to your design drive, their absence (or resignation) can mean a full stop on your product’s development or maintenance.
Our Splash team of dedicated Customer Success Managers makes sure every new admin from management down to your local event host is brought up to speed and comfortable in the tool.
We are event planners and we know what event planners need. When you start listing the services you’ll want an internal team to build, the capabilities start to pile up quickly (landing pages, dashboards, ticketing platforms, calendars, email services, guest list management, and check in apps, just to name a few).
But we’re 10 steps ahead of you. We’re flexible and iterative. When web security or email best practices evolve over the next year (which they undoubtedly will), we’ll still be able to deliver a reliable product that works.
Splash is a data and insight-driven company. And we know that each client may want to measure specific items to calculate the impact and ROI of their efforts. Sometimes that’s sales, other times it’s engagement or recruitment. Splash was engineered around gathering this kind of data and not only tracks each interaction, but can even extract key insights that allow you to course correct and forecast what’s coming up next.
Unlike a homegrown tool where you have to retroactively build reporting based on the data you’ve obtained over time, Splash’s reporting is available to you the second you launch your program. Plus, of course, you get a Customer Success team who are experts in community growth and data science who can help you analyze your information and provide key feedback.
The beauty of software as a service (Saas) is that you pay for a license that grants you access to a tool we’ve already invested millions of dollars in building. You reap the benefits of our tried and tested functionality and previous battle scars from lessons learned. We can disperse our development costs across hundreds of thousands of users.
Have an event next week? What about tonight? Your company can hit the ground sprinting with Splash. No designers, developers, or experts needed. You can make a beautiful white-labeled event site, send invitations to your guest list, and start collecting RSVPs in a matter of minutes. Seriously. And want all the stuff we mentioned about user data and customer tracking, too? It’s baked into your very first event page. It’s scalable. It’s efficient. And it doesn’t hurt that it looks pretty cool, too.
Want to get started? Request a free demo.
