Hоw to Make a Mobile Conference or Event App: Features and Costs

At the end of that article, we advised you to build a native and customized application and enjoy the benefits of such an approach, instead of making it up with templates. So let’s review what features are essential for tailor-made event management apps.

📱 Top 9 Essential Features for Mobile Event Apps

Before you build a local event app, it’s important to define a comprehensive list of features that you’re going to include for your event planning. Most often, they don’t differ too much from one app to another. And I mean it.

That’s exactly why App Builders started springing up like mushrooms after the rain. Sacrifice uniqueness and User Experience, but get cheap event apps that look exactly like hundreds of others. Taking into account, that a conference (or any other custom event type) usually lasts just a couple of days - sounds like a reasonable option to consider, huh? Anyway, as we mentioned earlier - thanks to Apple that’s a story from the past.

In this article, we’ll tell you about the common set of features for most event mobile planning apps. Let’s get it started!

“What? Where? When?” Team

If you’re wondering what the 4 most popular questions about any event are, here you go:

• What is this event about?
• Where will it take place?
• When is it going to happen?
• Who will be there?

A good event management mobile app answers these questions. If it doesn’t — its value drops to zero. That’s why the Stormotion team believes that an event schedule, a program preview, and a map are must-have parts of every event management app. Let’s quickly review them.

Schedule

This feature may sound obvious to you but it’s really difficult to underestimate its importance. Unless you don’t want your attendees to come a day after all fun took place.

The built-in booking feature not only allows to reduce the spending but also provides users with new possibilities. In this case, they can buy tickets with a few taps when they’re at home or in the office.

Customer service

Events usually involve many people of different age, sex, interests, levels of education and so on. It’s just impossible to foresee what questions they all may have. What’s even worse about it for organizers: if something remained unclear, many would prefer just not to attend your event at all.

Not a very good perspective for you, isn’t it?

Moreover, your attendees may face some troubles during their visit. You may argue that good old hotlines still work well. No, actually, they don’t.

So make sure your visitors can report or ask something with a few taps right in the app. This can be achieved with a pretty simple customer support SDK. And, of course, take care about a response speed.

Push notifications

In almost each of our articles about different kinds of mobile apps, we mention push notification as an effective retargeting and marketing tool. Alerts about important announcements, reminders for scheduled events, notifications about new messages in the in-app chat - all these tools help to constantly stay in sight of users and keep them involved.

Moreover, you can set up automatic notifications that don't require ane extra management from your side. Thus, they'll be automatically sent to your app users in the needed cases.

According to Localytics Data Team, you can reach up to 88% engagement boost with push notifications.

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So these were 9 features that are commonly used in the event app development. But how much will it cost to build a mobile application that includes them? That’s what you’re about to find out!

💰 What About the Event App Development Cost?

As always, we remind you that each case should be treated individually. So if you’re looking for an accurate estimate of an event planning mobile app, contact us and we will provide you with an estimation within 24 hours.

However, I have also prepared an approximate estimation together with our developers from the Stormotion team so that you have at least a rough idea of the possible cost.

We used React Native as a framework to build an app for both iOS and Android apps with excellent native user experience. Here’s what we’ve got:

💡 4 Recommendations for You to Follow by The Stormotion Team

I have a harsh truth for you: it’s not enough just to put the mentioned above 9 features together to get a brilliant event planning app. Here are 4 tips to understand how to make an event app of top-notch quality.

Advice # 1: Build the App around Your Event

Or, in other words, treat each case individually. The main problem of different event apps builders was the lack of uniqueness. Yet, you don’t cook a soup and a pie using the same set of actions and groceries, do you? So why would you build an application for a two-day music fest and a book sale in the same way? Every event requires its own approach.

Therefore, I urge to think carefully about your event at first. And only then move to the event app development stage.

Advice # 4: Think Consistently

Our last recommendation to you is that you shouldn’t think of your app as some separate product. Consider it as an integral part of your project that aims to improve the experience of visitors. This means you should think what value can it offer before, during and after the event.

For example, before the event starts you can encourage users to be more active by raffling off some nice gifts and benefits (for example, free coffee during the break or a personal consultation with one of the speakers).

Also, don’t miss the opportunity to utilize your app during the event. You and your speakers can collect real-time feedback on the quality of the speech or the whole conference. Gifts also work well at this stage. Actually, everything that makes users interact with the mobile application at this stage creates a more positive experience.

Afterward, you can turn the app into a communication platform where people will be able to contact speakers or each other and share their thoughts and feelings, find new friends or, who knows, start a long-lasting partnership.

With about 2.46 billion social media users in 2017, you should also pay attention to this segment of the Internet. You can get fresh and honest feedbacks through your Twitter account as well as collect organic photos from Facebook pages and use them in your application.

❗ Conclusion

With Apple’s new guidelines it became hard to use app builders - the main “source” of event apps until recently. What is the solution? Yes, custom & native app development.

Possible expenses are not as big (even comparing to app-builders) as they may seem: from 10,000$. But like the old tagline from Mastercard: “You can buy an app. User experience? Priceless”. Joking, it’s our motto ;)

If you have any questions regarding the conference or event planning app development, don't hesitate to drop us a line!