Arts People vs. Cvent Event Management

Arts People is one of the best business decisions our theatre has ever made. It relieves staff of some of the tedious, time-consuming tasks while increasing the ease of selling tickets and subscriptions. That's our goal--to sell tickets easily, in a user-friendly manner at a reasonable cost. That's what Arts People allows us to do. It works for tiny venues (to greet each guest personally) as well as huge venues (ticket scanning solution). It is less appropriate for a one-time event. An Arts People user should have an ongoing series of events to take advantage of all the features (it even has a membership feature) and the time for training.

Incentivized

The breadth of features is such that Cvent Event Management is a strong choice for events of significant scope and complexity, particularly in volume and diversity of programming. The learning curve may be on the steep side for customers with simpler needs, though Cvent Event Management is addressing this by providing more streamlining in their solution suite.

Incentivized

• Their customer service is unsurpassed. Sometimes several folks will be working on different aspects of a complicated request, to address all the details. Once things are exactly the way I want it, as in season subscription package sales, a representative checks in to make sure we're satisfied. Only then is the ticket closed.
• They have a very comprehensive, full featured ticketing system for all types of events and venues. Their dynamic door list is our favorite feature--no static printed door lists for us. That helps us greet each patron with up-to-date information and check them off the list. While my box officers are doing that, I can be at a remote location and see in real time who has arrived. We can make collaborative decisions about, for instance, holding the curtain for a critics arrival or adding a chair for an unexpected guest of a ticket-holder. We can keep a couple of tickets on hold for box officer discretion to address those unforeseen ticket window requests. Great flexibility which allows us to be efficient while giving good customer service to our patrons.
• Even though the system is full-featured, it is not beyond the skills of those who considers themselves non-technical. Two sessions of training will get a box officer up-and-running. Because there are different levels of access, we don't have to worry about someone changing essential programming while they are checking in patrons.
• They made their ticket landing page look like our website, so people don't even realize that they have been taken somewhere else. Plus, the patron can easily navigate back to our actual site, seamlessly.

Incentivized

• Registration platform can handle nearly any need.
• Event websites are easy to build and support customization.
• Support is available in multiple formats should you run into issues.
• There is a large user community where you can reach out for ideas and help.

Incentivized

• Anything I've asked for, I've gotten so I don't see any need for improvement at the moment.

Incentivized

• You have to implement a workaround to use images in your session descriptions.
• They tend to add features by acquiring other platforms, but then don't always cleanly integrate them into Cvent itself, so they always seem sort of ratcheted on.
• The media and document library is pretty basic, so you need to take extra steps to link PDFs and other documents within the registration process if you choose to host the docs on Cvent.

Incentivized

I enjoy the app and what it has to offer. It makes working in events a lot easier! Before I would have to go to our warehouse and print name badges and write out different names if they needed it. Attendees also did not have access to our breakout sessions. Now, I can adjust names onsite and we can allow attendees to access our sessions before the event begins

Incentivized

Cvent has a lot of functionality, which can be overwhelming to new users who are not too technically savvy. However, Cvent does a great job of providing tools and support for users to learn and troubleshoot. I also appreciate the work and progress that Cvent has been making in Accessibility.

Incentivized

Cvent does go down pretty frequently. And while it often doesn't impact day to day use usually, if it does go down at the wrong time, you may not be able to access very important event information when you need it. Usually outages do not last very long, but it could still be a very bad situation if this happens at the wrong moment

Incentivized

When pulling reports and it can sometimes lag a bit and that can be frustrating when you are trying to get things done on a timeline

Incentivized

The company offers 24/7 customer support, including phone, email, and chat support, to ensure that we can get help when we need it. Additionally, the platform has a comprehensive help center and knowledge base, including user guides, tutorials, and FAQs, which help us troubleshoot issues on our own. Cvent also provides training and support resources, including onboarding assistance, live training sessions, and webinars, which help us get the most out of the platform. Overall, Cvent appears to be committed to providing excellent customer support and resources to its users, which can help ensure a positive user experience and successful events.

Incentivized

Our on-site trainer was very knowledgeable in the product and gave us very important pointers on best practices and how to perform tasks in the simplest manner

Incentivized

It was all self-driven and I had to do a lot of searching around in the community to get answers.

Incentivized

It would have been nice during implementation if we had received more pointers on how to organize our parked report folders, libraries, etc. to avoid the mess we find ourselves in today. If we had known ahead of time the limitations we could have planned better.

Incentivized

• Eventbrite is better for single, one-time events but isn't as full-featured as Arts People.
• Brown Paper Tickets is clunky to use and harder to change globally when an event changes or adds shows.
• Vendini--never used it because when I researched 10 different ticketing companies, they were the least helpful. They didn't listen to our needs, and instead told us what we should have. They were much more expensive than Arts People as well.
• Constant Contact is truly great as a marketing tool. But their events feature was awkward and the payment method was Paypal. However, since it's integrated with Arts People, we can use Arts People for sales and Constant Contact for marketing.

Incentivized

Honestly, Cvent Event Management's registration platform is superior. The logic, setup options are far better than what the companies above have to offer. The only downfall is that it is far more expensive, and sometimes isn't needed for the most basic of registration sites.

Incentivized

We use Cvent for many different clients and events. It's very easy to customize the experience for the event that you need

Incentivized

• Positive - Our online vs phone call or in-person sales have increased steadily over the past 4 years since using Arts People. Less labor for us, more sales.
• Positive - People are buying their tickets earlier than they used to - to reserve a coveted seat in a possible sold-out performance. That makes planning our marketing easier--whether to offer HotTix or special coded offers for shows that have fewer sales.
• Negative - Some older folks still have problems with redeeming their subscription tickets for individual tickets without our personal assistance. We've been trying to pinpoint what that is--and Arts People helped us make a few adjustments. Sometimes people don't like to log in. That's one of the challenges of an integrated system. If the patron's profile changes in a way that impacts their subscription links, we need to step in. However, the overall time it has saved us in managing subscriptions is immeasurable.

Incentivized

• The Cvent suite of events has drastically reduced redundant work throughout our events department allowing us to streamline a lot of the registration/software aspects of our events and allow us to focus on other areas of our events that had previously been placed on the back burner.
• Since Cvent Event Management is so widely use, many of our attendees, exhibitors and speakers are familiar with the platform so they are able to seamlessly operate within it for their needs with little to no learning curve.
• We're able to pull more accurate and customized reports based on specific information we need with each event.
• We able to offer our registrants a more customized experience with their registration and event platforms. This allows us to customize and innovate our events in new ways we previously hadn't been able to.

Incentivized