It’s a question we are often asked by event planners and venues alike, and as we believe in transparency, we are happy to provide the answer….
Eventopedia.com operates a freemium business model, which means that basic services and functionality are offered free of charge with additional, higher value services offered at a premium on a subscription basis. This enables users to gain value and see the benefits of our offering first hand before deciding whether to purchase additional services.
Eventopedia.com is the events platform built by events professionals for events professionals. As such, we understand that event professionals, like you, require - and expect - detailed information and you expect information fast. A lot of the information you require to assist you with your choice of venue is often difficult to find or is not readily available. You may be familiar with clicking endlessly around a hotel website and only seeing information relating to bedrooms and leisure facilities. What happened to the meetings space? Ten clicks later and you’ve found a picture of what looks like a Ballroom, but there’s little supporting information informing you of capacities and additional function space for your breakout sessions. Cue: frustration. Eventopedia packages all the relevant information required in an easily digestible and accessible format, which is fast to search and filter to assist you in establishing the right options for your event brief. This search functionality, including our Venue Finder Add-In for Office 365 - enabling you to find the right solutions and connect quickly with the venues (directly from within your email environment if you’ve installed the Office 365 Add-In) - is free for event planners. We enable you to make 3 searches without registering, but for continued use, we require you to create a user account and profile, that will enable you to interact with your professional peers, share useful tips & information via the reviews function, and allows us to continue refining our offering so that it becomes more bespoke and personalised to you over time.
Eventopedia will continue to evolve our products & services to provide event planners, like you, with more tools that will help create efficiencies and make valuable time savings both during and post the event planning process. We run regular product innovation workshops throughout the year, hosted in a beautiful venue and run by our charismatic Chief Product Officer. If you would like to be involved in some of our user innovation workshops to ensure your ideas are heard, then please contact us. Some of these additional services, when available, will be accessible by paying a subscription fee.
Our current premium services, and therefore how Eventopedia makes money, comes from the event venues and suppliers, but not via the traditional advertising and/or commission models.
Why?... We believe in providing an independent and democratic search platform whereby all the search results represent the best match with the search criteria you have entered. As seasoned event planners, we know how frustrating it can be to visit a listing site and search for venues, only to be presented with a list of options that don’t match with the event brief partly because those results are influenced by sponsors.
Event venues & suppliers can list their services for free, as it’s important for event planners to have access to as many of the available options in a given city / destination. We sell specialist Pro-Active sales, marketing & distribution solutions to hotels & venues; Video Site Inspection (VSI), Managed Media Spend Management, and Inbound Marketing solutions to event venues & suppliers, which have a range of benefits to the venues as well as to you, the event planner.
Our Pro-active Inbound Marketing packages focus upon content creation in the form of blogs, written by our trained journalists. These blogs focus on the individual stories of hotels and venues, as well as case studies that are focussed upon key information event planners want and need to know. Blog content will frequently appear in our weekly ‘events intelligence’ newsletters. The inbound marketing also includes display led campaigns across multiple 3rd party channels, such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, which amplifies individual hotel & venue visibility to event professionals like you, as you are typically active across a range of different platforms, regularly searching for inspiration and ideas for events. We track the engagement and success of these campaigns and report it back to the hotels and venues. Search via the Eventopedia.com platform, therefore, remains completely independent from any commercial arrangements, and is entirely democratic.
Video Site Inspection (VSI) - Our interactive video site inspection is a unique offering in the hospitality market. As videos are interactive, they typically contain between 5-20 individual films, informing the viewer of a range of different facilities available at a hotel or venue, from large meeting space, to exhibition halls, boardrooms, food & beverage outlets, leisure facilities, to hotel accommodation. This enables you, the event planner, to follow the pathway you wish based upon your specific requirements and discover the information you need, quickly and efficiently. VSI utilise graphical display information to provide you with key information such as room capacities and dimensions, and can include floor plans and still photography. It’s a flexible product, which you can utilise for internal presentations to senior stakeholders when presenting back your host venue options for final decision-making. We have multiple case studies of event planners utilising VSI as a physical site inspection, negating the need to board a plane (for International venue searches) and see the venue. VSI has been used as the key visual aid for host venue decision-making, saving both time and cost.
Managed media spend - We use business intelligence collated from usage of our platform and engagement with our campaigns, across various distribution channels, to help inform display advertising and enable hotels & venues to achieve more with their media spend budgets than when they manage this spend directly.
As seasoned events professionals, we wanted Eventopedia to challenge the status quo. We wanted to create the events platform that we could never find, that delivers what events professionals actually need rather than what someone from outside our industry thinks we need. We want to provide the help we would have liked when our team was overstretched. We have created the virtual back up team for our peers that would have helped us answer the things we didn’t know. Our mission is to build a platform where the great technology is underpinned by our innate understanding of what we know events professionals need to know and do. We want to make event professionals’ lives easier and more profitable.