Do you remember the ill-fated Fyre Festival from a couple of months ago? If not, here’s a quick rundown – the event was touted as “the next Coachella” and according to People.com, promised an impressive music line up, celebrity chef catered meals and luxury accommodations.

But as you may’ve guessed, things didn’t really go down as planned. As Forbes reports, when people arrived – some of whom paid $12,000 for VIP tickets – what they found was a lot closer to the set of Hunger Games than the Coachella-like event they were promised.

The main problem was that the island’s infrastructure wasn’t really equipped to handle the influx of visitors. Event’s co-creator, rapper Ja Rule immediately started apologizing on Twitter, saying that while the failure wasn’t his fault, he’s willing to fully take responsibility for it.

While this was one of the most famous failed events in the last couple of years, it wasn’t the only one. In fact, events fail all the time, even though the news outlets don’t speak much about it. So if you’re an event planner, you have to be ready for everything…

How to Leverage Technology to Your Advantage

Event planners are often being asked to do more than they could handle. What’s worse, most of them don’t have all the resources they need to improve their process in an effective way.

But that’s where technology comes into play.

A recent Social Tables survey of event professionals revealed that more than 35% of people believe that the arrival of event technology has made a rather big impact on the event planning industry.

Basically today, you have so much technology that it would be unwise, the say the least, to ignore it and stick to making phone calls to venues and exchanging emails with promoters.

So in order to help you avoid any major difficulties, here are five event-planning tools that will make your job a lot easier and allow you to concentrate on the bigger picture…

Top Five Event-Planning Apps

With Splash, you’ll be able to fully customize your event online experience. App’s features give users everything they need to create and maintain their own mobile-optimized event web page, sell tickets and send individual email invitations. Splash is also great for management, because it will allow you to build and track your budget and share files with your team members through its dashboard.

And if that’s not enough for you, you’ll be happy to know that the app also provides analytics that will give you valuable insights, which will ensure that your page is going in the right direction. When it comes to individual use, the app is free of charge, but if you opt for the corporate plan, you’ll be able to create an unlimited number of event pages.

Doodle

When you’re organizing a small event, you usually want to get some input from your guests. Well, Doodle will make scheduling events easier, by allowing attendees to have their say in a simple poll. Simply put, you can put a couple of dates and by using the app, your guests will be able to vote on the best dates and times that suit their availability.

One of the better features Doodle has is its ability to connect with your address book, sync up with all the contacts and make inviting people to vote on the poll much simpler. Furthermore, you can also connect with your calendar on iCal or Outlook, and sync up the finished meeting polls with the rest of your schedule.

KweekWeek

Here you have a London-based event-hosting and marketing platform that allows the users to create both a private and a public event with custom logos, images and even videos. After you create your event, KweekWeek allows you to track everything from your attendee list, site visits and sales from a dedicated dashboard within the app.

In addition to tracking capabilities, the app also has a couple of unique social tools and features that will allow you to market this and future events with ease. For instance, any attendee can chose to follow the event planner, which is great when you get ready to launch the next event. We have to mention that the app is free only if your event is free, but if you’re charging, then you’ll have to share profits

Gojee

All you need to do is type in the ingredients you would like to work with, and you’ll get a number of different, visually stunning photos of foods and drinks. All you need to do afterward is click on the photo and the app will take you to an external blog with the recipe you need and suggest a few other dishes with similar ingredients.

Seat Advisor

Seat Advisor is a ticketing software that enables both individual event planners and event managing companies to sell tickets for their shows directly to their clients. With this app, event attendees will be able to book tickets though a number of mediums like box-office counters, online shops and through phone sales.

It has a number of useful features, some of which include web-based box office that includes Seat Maps functionality that provides users with seat photos and helps them select desired seats. What’s more, the software also recognize the device a user is using to buy tickets and optimizes his or her experience accordingly.

Final Thoughts

Let’s get back to the aforementioned Fyre Festival once again. Chances are, if your event fails, it won’t make such a splash. However, the moral of the story is, there is no such things like “all of this is not my fault” when you’re in a leadership position.

If you’re trying to become a serious team leader, you have to be mature enough and have a personal responsibility for everything that happens. If anything goes wrong and your start playing the “blame game” you’ll definitely have a really hard time earning the trust of your team members.