As we look forward to 2024, we take a moment to reflect on the progress made here at Events500 throughout 2023.

Growing Partnerships: Events500 has successfully onboarded new venue partners across the UK and Ireland. Notable additions this year include Kingscote Barn (pictured), a busy wedding venue in Gloucestershire, Championship football club Birmingham City F.C., Colchester Events Company, a multi-venue events company in central Colchester, and Forbes of Kingennie, a country resort in Scotland.

Enhanced Payment Processes: The introduction of embedded payment gateways in invoices facilitates quicker payment processing.

Table Planner Improvements: The Table Planner feature continues to be popular amongst both existing and new customers with its user-friendly design, incorporating new elements like drag-and-drop seating arrangements and customizable text boxes.

Live Availability Integration: Five venues are now integrated with venuedirectory.com’s Live Availability, giving their bookers an additional avenue of enquiry.

New Meeting View: The new meeting view simplifies the process of updating documents, making it quicker and easier than ever before to edit notes and timings.

Introduction Portal: Our new venue introduction portal aims to give prospective venues a transparent understanding of Events500 even before a demonstration to help them understand how Events500 can provide benefits to their business.

Training Demand: Amongst our existing customers, we’ve seen a significant increase in new starter training requests, which points towards growing teams as the events industry continues to recover from the effects of Covid-19.

Transition to the Web: Following the launch of Events500i, 85% of our venue partners have now successfully transitioned to our browser-based version.

We’d like to thank all our customers for their support this last year and we look forward to continuing to work with them and new venues in 2024.

Sustainability

It’s rightly a hot topic in every industry and there’s no doubt that it’s here to stay.

For busy wedding, conference and event venues, there’s always paper trails involved, and often, these are printed out multiple times for multiple staff.

We did a quick calculation, and for a mid-sized venue hosting 20 events per week where each function sheet is on average 2 pages long, we estimate annual paper usage of more than 25,000 sheets of paper per year.

We all know that saving paper is good for the environment. It reduces deforestation, saves water, reduces pollution, and prevents illegal logging. It also reduces costs, and in our current economic climate any savings are significant.

We don’t expect any venue to eliminate the need for paper entirely, but by implementing Events500i as your events management system, staff in any department at your venue could have access to real-time booking information and documents rather than having to rely on printed copies.

In addition to this, all customer facing documents are sent from Events500i as URLs, including contracts which can be digitally signed. These are all accessible by the customer in their customer portal, reducing the need to print even further.

From this perspective, Events500i isn’t just a powerful, easy to use events management system, implementing it is also a great way to make progress towards your venue’s net-zero target and save costs.  

Call or email our sales team to find out about the other ways Events500 can help your venue save time and money.

Vote Here (mia-uk.org)

Events500 has been selected as a FINALIST for Supplier of the Year for the miaList 2022!! So proud of our team who work so hard to provide the best product and service to our customers. 

Now it's time for the public to have their say and we need your votes! Click the link above to vote for Events500 - it only takes 30 seconds.

Events500 (mia-uk.org)

We've partnered with the Meetings Industry Association to provide a feed from Events500i to their industry-first benchmarking system Touchstone.

Our goal was to reduce administration time for mia members using Events500i, increase the amount of feedback they received and improve the quality of the benchmarking data. In a recovering industry, feedback is key to ensuring venues are consistently delivering high quality events and securing business for the future.

Developments for e500i have been coming thick and fast this year, but one of the most exciting new features for this year is the launch of our Table Planner.

Fully integrated with e500i, venues can now create a to-scale table plan and seating plan for every event. Seating plans which are used often can be set up as default layouts to save time or create totally bespoke plans when required.

Give your customers access to their own portal where they can view their booking documents and complete and submit their own seating plan including menu choices, special diets and other important information. Once submitted, print the plan or generate a report with menu choices for the kitchen and front of house team.

We feel this will be a huge time saver for many venues and has been developed based on feedback from our customers. To book a demonstration, check pricing or ask any questions, contact sales@events500.com or call 0845 680 5154.

Our new Online Proposals give the quotation document a new look and feel and are viewed by your customers in a web browser. We can match your brand styling and include more imagery than the original proposal document. Best of all, we complete the set-up for you!

To view an example, click here, and for more information, contact our support team on 0845 680 5154 or e-mail support@events500.com.

We are very excited to announce the launch of our brand new browser based solution events500i.

We have spent nearly 3 years developing the system and are incredibly pleased with the feedback we've received so far. Speed, ease of use, a new contemporary design, and maintaining the all the great features of our legacy system events500 (without compromising the layout) were all at the heart of the design process. We're proud that we have been able to embed all these key attributes successfully into events500i. 

Moving from Windows to a browser based system you may expect to lose some capabilities, however with events500i this is not the case, all of the features you have come to know and love with events500 are available in events500i, with the added benefit of being able to access these features on any device, wherever you are.

Being browser based isn't all that's new however,  events500i also has some new capabilities:

• A dashboard - a fantastic tool for data analysis. Charts and graphs are by far the most effective way to spot data trends so we were very keen to make this as effective as possible in the new system. Using our dashboard will give you the ability to spot trends far more quickly, making it easier for you to identify areas where you're excelling and others where there is opportunity for improvement.

• All documents are now online for ease of update/access, including online contract signing.

• The Customer Portal is another new feature we're excited about, it  gives your customers one easy to use place where they can view and create all of their own documentation.  In addition to this, customers can also contact you about a specific booking, sending the assigned sales person an email and creating a task within that booking automatically, saving time on both ends. 

All of these new features, coupled with the ability to access the system on any device, are capabilities we are excited to now be able to offer to you. We are, however, not done yet, we will be continuing to add more features to events500i that help you manage your events more efficiently.

We've loved developing events500i and are very much looking forward to you using it. 

We are delighted to announce that Colchester United will be launching their Online Bookings website this month.
"We are very excited to take further advantage of events500 with the new Online booking module that will allow our customers to quickly and easily book meeting rooms online.  The no-touch add on allows customers to view available rooms at the JobServe Community Stadium based on their specific criteria and select catering options, equipment and extras to suit their event – all booked and paid for online.  This is ideal for small bookings and existing customers who know what they are looking for. Integration with our existing events management system, more booking options for our customers and more time for the Colchester United events team to focus on large/complex events made the decision to implement Online Bookings easy and cost effective." Tim Waddington, General Manager, Colchester United FC

“I would highly recommend events500 to other businesses. The installation process, staff training and support has been most beneficial to our company. The system itself is extremely easy to use and makes the quoting, contracting and invoicing process streamline. It is easy to add new bookable items as the business and packages change, and if we do run into any difficulty, the support team are always on hand to assist in an extremely quickly manner.”  Sales Manager, The Glasshouse

Running a wide range of events from weddings, to conferences and exhibitions, Pavilions of Harrogate manages a full calendar of events throughout the year.

Pavilions decided after another busy year of events that they needed a new solution which could support them in their growth. The solution needed to be able to manage their events, from creating event packages and providing quotes to customers, to managing bookings and resourcing for events of all types.

Their current event management system was not delivering the functionality they needed to manage a varied range of events, as it was primarily developed for organising and operating exhibitions. As their range of events had increased, Pavilions of Harrogate needed a solution that could cope with the scale of event types they were now operating throughout the year.

After assessing a number of events management solutions, Pavilions of Harrogate chose events500 from our reseller Verteda. events500 manages every part of the event process, with a focus on operational efficiency and improving the customer experience.

Fiona Stilborn, Sales Manager at Pavilions of Harrogate, said, “We reviewed a number of events management software packages, however, we found that events500 provided all the functionality we needed as a venue that operates a number of different types of events, whilst still being cost-effective.”

As a business venue with events occurring all through the year, Pavilions of Harrogate wanted a solution that could be implemented with minimal disruption so that no events were impacted as a result of the migration to a new solution.

events500 was deployed in January 2018 across the venue with a smooth transition over from their previous solution.

“We’re extremely pleased with how easily the solution has been to deploy across our estate, and our team quickly adapted after the excellent training from the events500 team,” commented Fiona Stilborn.

events500 is an end to end event management solution, managing every part of the process from the first enquiry to on-the-day event management, right through to gathering post-event feedback. Seamlessly integrating with Microsoft Office and common email platforms, it is an easy-to-use solution, perfect for single and multi-venue properties managing a range of different events.

“We’re thrilled to have Pavilions of Harrogate on board as a customer,” commented Matthew Prosser, Sales Director at Verteda. “We look forward to developing a long-term partnership with the team at Pavilions of Harrogate and supporting them through the busy events season.”