Brightly Event Manager™ vs. Whova

This is an ideal program for any school or district looking for a way to monitor room and maintenance requests. The digital routing availability will help ease the burden of paper copies and make it quicker for everyone to use and submit their needs. Schools with a variety of staff members are best suited, especially since when submitting a request you can designate those that need to be involved and what specific needs you have from facility to technology.

Incentivized

Whova was appropriate for the purpose of a health conference. I would recommend the platform to other NGOs considering platforms for their conferences, particularly if engagement is a critical process and outcome of the conference. As a health conference that involved people with living experience of the health topics at the conference, i.e. peer workers, peers in professional roles, people from affected communities, engagement was important.

• You are able to designate whether you are submitting a maintenance request or a schedule request (for rooms).
• You can set recurring schedules for areas or rooms you may need weekly or monthly to be requested on a set day or time.
• SchoolDude autoroutes to the personnel you designate, taking out any physical paperwork involved.
• You can see your history of requests (both maintenance and schedule) in the database.

Incentivized

• Speakers, exhibitors, and sponsor management (they can enter their own information/profiles!)
• Webpages get generated automatically for agenda, speakers, exhibitors, and sponsor information entered within Whova! Then, we can drop this information into our website and it gets automatically when something gets updated within Whova (for example, a speaker updates their title
• Or credentials)

Incentivized

• The filter and ability to sort through your request history is a little difficult to navigate and can be glitchy if you are not sorting in the correct way.
• There should be a quicker and simpler way to verify whether a room is booked prior to scheduling.
• A cleaner, more simplistic look and navigation would go a long way.

Incentivized

• Literature and pictures uploaded but no easy way to download the collection.
• No easy way to access information after the period after the conference ended.
• No easy way to access the list of participants and contact information - could be pdf'd.
• There was a little connectivity issues but not much.
• Some of the meetings were scheduled while we slept.
• The cost of using Whova for small meetings.

Incentivized

We already registered with Whova for our 2024 event and we will continue to use Whova for the foreseeable future as long as the price doesn't rise too high. It was a bit of a shock to see the difference between last year's price and this year's price - nearly 2k increase! We were able to negotiate, thankfully, to lower the price.

Most of Whova's functions are intuitive and you can self-teach about 80% of it with ease. I really was impressive with the messaging, follow up meet-up capabilities and sharing of contact information. My only few concerns were about the lack of an archive or back up, [perhaps cloud-based?] of the meeting room and round-table's presentations

We had no availability issues!

We had no performance issues with our event delivery. We did have some meet-ups that had some glitches for some attendees, but I believe they were quickly resolved and were more on the part of user error than anything. Once they got the hang of it, their meet-ups went more smoothly.

I only had a single issue regarding a photograph that was handled immediately and a colleague somehow ended up with two profiles which was also handled right away. Those two instances are all I have to go by. Other than that it was smooth but I did have ample information regarding who to contact if I experienced an issue

I found Whova to be similar to many social media apps that I already use. It was easy to navigate. This was my second experience using Whova in my presenter role. I liked the icebreaker section to connect with other participants before the event started. I look forward to next year’s event.

This is the only program I have used for the facility, maintenance, technology, and room requests. However, there are programs that include similar features. Frontline Professional Growth is a platform that includes digital forms and routing similar to SchoolDude. But it is a vastly more in-depth program with features that go beyond what SchoolDude is often used for.

Incentivized

We selected Whova for price, and ease of use. We would have chosen GoToWebinar but they did not have as many options for sponsor recognition. We will most likely use Event Rebels in the future for our needs. Tracking time and sessions viewed is a must for our industry as attendees rely on us to earn CEs to renew their licensing.

I especially liked the ease of communication, the ability to ask hard questions easily, and afterward the ability to survey all participants to see what we (and/or Whova) could do better going forward.

Everyone on our team had their assigned tasks to complete in Whova on a weekly basis and did so with ease and confidence.

• Less printing and copying in a district.
• Quicker submitting and processing time.
• Able to track requests and see what is being used in the district.

Incentivized

• I didn't pay to use the technology; was a recipient as a result of attending a conference. HIGH ROI for me as a made a number of new contacts even though I spent the first full day listening to presentations. Having the app allowed me to do the networking I came to do without having to be seated next to the person I wanted to meet.