Software/Event management software
Event management software, built by the person who has to stand up and use it.
Ticketing, seating, check-in, the running order, guest comms and the big screen. Everything an evening needs before anybody asks for a penny. You do not have to be raising money to use it.
First, the obvious question about the name at the top of this page
Generosity Works is a fundraising business, and this platform was built for charity galas. So if you have arrived here looking for event management software for a corporate dinner, an awards night or a conference, it is fair to wonder whether you are in the right place.
You are, and here is why. A charity gala is the most demanding version of an ordinary event. It has everything a corporate dinner has, and it has all of it under more pressure: four hundred people to seat, a running order that cannot slip, a door to get through in twenty minutes, a room to hold, a screen behind the stage. The fundraising sits on top of that. It does not replace it.
Which means roughly three quarters of what got built has nothing to do with raising money at all. This page is about that three quarters.
The parts that have nothing to do with fundraising
What is actually in it
Tickets and registration
Tiers, tables of ten, VIP packages, early bird, capacity limits. A ticket is an ordinary product in the shop underneath, which is a deliberately boring decision: discount codes, VAT, card payments and reporting all work already because they are not ours.
Who is actually coming
One person buys a table of ten. You need ten names, ten dietaries and ten job titles, and you need them from somebody who bought the table six weeks ago and has stopped thinking about it. There is a page for exactly that, and the chase email points at it.
Registration questions
The things you have to know before the night rather than on it. Dietary requirements, access needs, who they want to sit with, which session they are booking. Asked at the point of purchase, attached to the guest and not to the buyer.
Breakouts and sessions
Sessions a guest books a place on, each with a limit on how many can. The workshop that fits thirty stops taking bookings at thirty rather than at the door, which is the entire point.
The table plan
Drag tables onto a canvas that looks like the room, drag guests onto seats. It knows who has actually paid, so the plan cannot quietly seat somebody who cancelled. Guests get a find-my-table page on their phone.
Check-in on the door
Every guest has their own e-ticket and their own QR code. Scan, tick, in. Per guest and not per booking, so nine of a table of ten arriving does not read as ten.
The running order
The agenda as each guest needs to see it, on their phone, updated from one place when the speaker before dessert overruns by eleven minutes. Which is every event.
Talking to everybody
Email and SMS to the audience you choose: everyone, ticket holders, a single table, people who have not sent their guest names. Templates with merge tags, a record of what was sent and to whom, and unsubscribes handled properly.
The screen behind the stage
A full-screen display for the room that is driven from the same data as everything else, so it cannot disagree with the running order. Sponsors, the agenda, whatever the evening needs on it.
People who are not in the room
A watch-live embed for the guests who could not travel, on a page of your own rather than a bare video link, so a hybrid event feels like one event rather than a broadcast of somebody else’s.
The team on the night
A task list for the people working the event: assign a job, give it a time, see what is done. Plus a shared place for the run sheet, the floor plan and the sponsor pack, so nobody is searching an inbox at six o’clock.
Afterwards
One tappable question in the thank-you email, because a five-part survey gets answered by nobody. Guest records you can export, and a proper GDPR erase for anyone who asks.
The real thing, on the demo site
Tickets, seats and paperwork on one page
Tiers with live sold counters, a find-your-table lookup, and the run sheet and floor plan underneath. One page, and none of it is about fundraising.
The one everybody asks about
The table plan, and who is actually in the room
Every table carries how many of its seats are actually filled, so the gaps are visible from across the room rather than discovered at eight o’clock. Table 12 has not sold. Table 9 is six of ten. Guests find themselves on their own phone, or on this, projected by the door as they arrive.
Three things that matter more than the feature list
It does not need the venue’s wifi
Every event has the same story somewhere in its history: a full room, one overloaded router, and the thing you needed at that exact moment refusing to load. Check-in is the worst version, because it happens to two hundred people standing in a queue in a corridor.
So there is an on-site event server. It runs the evening from a machine in the room and does not care what the venue’s internet is doing. The QR codes are generated on your own site as well, with no third-party service in the path, so a scanner does not need to reach anybody else’s API to read a ticket.
Your client never sees WordPress
The platform runs on WordPress underneath, and almost nobody who uses it should ever find that out. There is an organiser mode: your client signs in and gets the event screens, their guest list, their table plan and their numbers. No dashboard, no plugins, no menu of forty things that will break if they press one.
It checks itself before the doors open
There is a pre-flight screen that goes looking for the things that are invisible until the night and unfixable on it. Emails going out under the wrong name. A payment method that cannot actually be charged. Tickets on sale with a time that has already passed. It says which of them would break the evening and which are only worth a look.
This was built the hard way. Every check on that screen is on it because it went wrong at a real event first. That is not a boast. It is the reason to trust the list.
What the guest is holding
It is their phone, and it is not an app store download
The evening installs to a home screen straight from the browser. No app store, no download, no guest at the door explaining they never got round to it.
Behind the stage
The screen the room is looking at
Driven by the same data as everything else, so it cannot disagree with the running order in your hand. Open it on the projector and leave it alone; nothing is ever reloaded.
The bit that is genuinely unusual
Most event software is sold by a software company. Most event hosts turn up with a microphone and use whatever the client has already bought. The two have never met, which is why the running order on the screen so often disagrees with the running order in the host’s hand.
Here they are the same person. I host events and I built this, which means every awkward join between the software and the night has been felt by the person who can fix it. When check-in was slow, I was the one watching the queue. When the screen said the wrong thing, I was the one standing next to it.
You can take the platform on its own and run the evening yourself. You can book me to host and the platform comes with it. What you cannot easily get anywhere else is both from one place, with nobody to blame in between.
What it is not
It is not Cvent, and it is not trying to be. If you are running a four-day conference for three thousand delegates with twelve tracks, badge printing and an exhibitor hall, buy the thing that is built for that.
This is built for an evening. Dinners, awards nights, balls, golf days, launches, conferences of a size where the whole room eats together. Somewhere between fifty and a thousand people, one night, one running order, one room that has to be held. That is a very large number of events and it is badly served, because the software written for it is either a spreadsheet or an enterprise platform with the price to match.
There is also no per-ticket cut. You use your own payment account and the money goes straight into it. We do not sit in the middle of it and we do not take a percentage of your event.
If you are also raising money
Then all of the above still applies, and the rest of it becomes relevant too. Silent and live auctions, pledge drives, Gift Aid, raffles, a running total on the wall that includes every one of them.
Worth reading next: ticketing and check-in in more detail, running the event itself, or the full feature list. If you want to press the buttons rather than read about them, ask for a demo site and you get a real one for a fortnight.
No per-ticket fee, and never a percentage of your event
Tell me about the evening.
Thirty minutes on what the night has to do, how many are coming and where it is being held, and an honest answer about whether this is the right tool for it.
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