Dreamforce 2008 Partner Preview: ActevaRSVP

I was treated to a sneak preview last week for ActevaRSVP 2.0, an event management tool from Acteva built specifically for Salesforce.com  and available on the AppExchange. Although ActevaRSVP has been around for a couple of years now, they are debuting this new version at Dreamforce on November 3rd, and I strongly recommend a visit to their booth for a demo while you are there -- especially if you have anything to do with events, meetings, webinars or corporate training.

Traditionally, if I have an event or webinar I use either my email vendor or my Salesforce.com email tools to handle the notification duties, and RSVP tracking would be done manually. This is not a complicated process, but it is time consuming and prone to error, which could be especially problematic if I needed to monitor attendance due to limitations of the meeting space, webinar tool, or food ordering requirements. I ask people to "please reply to this email if you would like to attend" and then file the responses into a folder in my Outlook for tracking.

Subsequent emails would ask people to "please RSVP if you have not already" but I invariably receive multiple notes from people I have already heard from, requiring me to go through each reply individually. And if I asked any questions in the email, even something as simple as "Do you want chicken or fish?" I would also need to tally that individually. And then there are the emails where people mention they will be bringing four of their colleagues. And they want two chickens, one fish and one macrobiotic vegan meal that wasn't on the menu.

I suppose I could use a survey tool, but that would involve setting up the survey in addition to the email - and then putting the details in the email, and tracking the results at multiple locations, and then updating my Salesforce.com campaign to make sure costs and ROI are being monitored, and on and on. In short, a real pain in the neck.

Acteva has been working on a really elegant solution to take the pain out of managing your event follow-up. It lives in your Salesforce.com instance, and has the tools in place to not only create and email the invitations to your webinar or event, but also to:

• Track RSVP's
• Create surveys and track results
• Synch and update any corresponding salesforce.com campaigns
• Easily segment responses for follow-up emails
• Track capacities and limitations of Event venues
• Build and host stand-alone web pages for event registration

That last piece has me very excited, as here at Demandbase we plan to much more aggressively market webinars over the next few quarters. I plan to link to ActevaRSVP event registration pages not only from our website, but also from any email campaigns I will be running in order to capture new leads and monitor registrations and RSVP's for these events. ActevaRSVP offers email delivery for their invitations, but with these stand-alone pages you can use different tools for email delivery -- such as lead nurturers like Marketo or Eloqua or Manticore (note: a reader in the comments section indicated Eloqua has demonstrated some good event management capabilities). I can simply insert the link for the registration page into the email and still get the benefits these tools offer. Double dipping at its finest!

Here at Demandbase we use Marketo for lead management, which has email delivery capabilities in addition to the lead scoring and nurturing that led us to them. Vertical Response has been an email service that I have personally used for years, at multiple companies. None of these tools give me what ActevaRSVP does, and the RSVP tool has evolved into something that not only works very well on its own but also complements these other tools I already use. In short, if you do events, you need ActevaRSVP. Pricing is reasonable at $65 per month for 5 event organizers/users and unlimited invitations, events and registrations (which should be plenty of room for most companies).

This is looking like the must-have application for event managers or corporate training teams using Salesforce.com. If you are going to Dreamforce, you should make a special trip to their booth for a demo.

Comments

[demandgenjunkie]

Interesting post...thanks for bringing them to our attention. My organization is looking at Eloqua and we like their event management piece. I wonder how this is different from their event management features. In their demo they showed things like RSVP, food preference, wait list, and automated follow-up features. Do you know?

[Jason Stewart]

I hadn't heard Eloqua had that functionality, I'll amend the blog piece. Thanks! I can't speak to how it is different since I haven't seen Eloqua recently, but I would be ask how they track the member status of the event in particular (Invited, Opened but Not Responded, etc), are custom fields needed to be created at the lead or contact level to capture any information or survey question answers, how well does it integrates with SFDC campaigns (if you are using them), how do they keep track of event venues (and their capacities and capabilities). ActevaRSVP handles all these things really simply and intuitively, and is really easy to install and use. Could be Eloqua handles all that stuff fine, but I that's what I would ask...

[DemandG]

FYI - I heard that Marketbright recently added this functionality as well.

[Twan]

How does this compare with RegOnline?

[Elias]

Unlike other applications ActevaRSVP looks and feels like Salesforce and really leverages your use of Salesforce. For example, you can invite leads, contacts and campaign members to an event. We (I work for Acteva) built it from the ground up as a Salesforce event registration and RSVP Tracking tool and that's what you get with ActevaRSVP.