Guidebook is an event management software system offered by Guidebook.
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RingCentral Events
Score 8.5 out of 10
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RingCentral Events (formerly Hopin) is an online events platform that provides tools for virtual events, or hybrid events, like ticketing and registration, limitless event rooms, an expo hall, chat, and networking, as well as event branding and attendee engagement tools. Integrations with online registration tools - such as Cvent, Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, and Eventbrite.
Most of our meetings are too small to bother using it but it is great for our larger workshops. If you have a complex schedule or agenda it is better than a paper agenda and allows you to adjust changes live in the agenda during the meetings. We only use it a few times a year because we only have a few larger meetings.
Hopin is very suitable for large events involving 100+ people where there are only a couple of people speaking. You can have a bunch of features such as networking and all in all, is quite a professional experience to use. For smaller groups, It takes too much effort to set up and isn't worth using over Google Meet or Zoom.
The biggest hangup we've encountered is from guest speakers who need to join us on either tablets or smartphones. Hopin doesn't play well with mobile devices for onscreen guests.
I'd like to see the broadcasts in vendor booths be recordable in the way broadcasts in the sessions or on the stage are.
I'm a pretty tech-savvy person but I still feel that Hopin was pretty user-friendly even for those of you who are less tech-savvy. Great thing is, you can play around and test the platform with the free version which allows you to get familiar with it before committing to the paid. I learned most of it on the free version which then made me more confident when deciding to use the paid version. Not only did it help me on the setup side, but it also proved to me that this was what we needed to do what we needed to do.
For the most part you're able to get a response from a support person within a few minutes, but there was a stretch when Hopin was reshuffling its staff that it sometimes took 24-48 hours, which is too long. However, as long as the staff remains stable - which seems likely - then its Support team is usually quite responsive.
We use both but for completely different reasons. We use Guidebook to manage our attendees and communicate with them during large workshops. We use Airtable as a spreadsheet type database for tracking things.
We were with a company before Hopin - we explored elsewhere due to cost. Pros were design and custom look. We moved to Hopin, it was innovative at the time, although the design wasn't strong the features were. The majority now have the same features. So we did leave Hopin for another platform again because we wanted a custom look, and we were preparing for hybrid. Hopin wasn't ready. We soon realised other platforms we came across are complex, difficult to use. We left and came back to Hopin.
Without Hopin, it would have been impossible to host an event at the scale and user interface that we did, with the staff limitations we have. Hopin enabled us to execute a very high standard with limited resources. For example, before Hopin, we could only attract about 100-200 attendees. With Hopin, we 3x our registrations and attendees.
The data collected from their system on attendees allows us to more accurately speak to our target market based on their tracked habits during the event.
