Event Tech of the Week: @CadmiumCD

Today, we’re talking about: CadmiumCD

Company/Tool Name: CadmiumCD

Website: http://www.cadmiumcd.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cadmiumcd

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cadmiumcd

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CadmiumCD

What is the “problem” that your tool seeks to solve? Meeting planners usually have to juggle a lot of vendors to get a powerful set of event management tools. We took many of those tools and put them onto one platform. Logistics, presentation, speaker, and exhibitor management; abstract collection and review; event apps and the attendee experience. We put them all under one umbrella.

We didn’t start with the tools though. We started by solving problems for meeting planners. Our first product was taking those big bulky conference proceedings binders and putting them on CD back in 2000. It made events more environmentally sustainable and gave attendees a bit more shelf space back home.

The meeting planners we worked with though needed a better way to collect submissions, so we built a software suite around their needs. That’s how we’ve always done things. When there’s a problem, we build a solution.

The benefit now is that all those tools we’ve built over the years to solve specific problems are part of one integrated event management system.

What is the best audience for this tool? Corporate events? Social? Other? Large? Small? We’ve worked with organizations of all shapes and sizes. From corporations with hundreds of employees to associations with a small core team. Our products have been used at internal training meetings with less than 50 attendees to large annual events with thousands of people.

The common theme is that our products — especially our attendee facing products like eventScribe — are geared toward educational meetings. There are other applications of course (The Consumer Electronics Association will be using our Abstract Scorecard to collect submissions for their CES Innovation Awards for example), but the majority of our clients have some sort of educational aspect to their events.

What does your tool help event planners do better? Our event management system at it’s essence helps event planners organize and manage their events before, during, and after the conference.

There’s only so much you can do with email and traditional spreadsheets before you want to pull out your hair. What all our products strive to do is bring the entire event management process into one comprehensive piece of software.

So anything a presenter submits at the very beginning of the planning process will eventually be built out onto the event app, website, and any digital displays onsite. If planners are recording their conference, our team syncs the audio with presentation slides and makes it available online and in the app as well. Plus, planners with multiple events won’t have to worry about collecting recurring speaker and exhibitor information. The system remembers all this for them.

It’s kind of like having an automated personal assistant.

How is your tool different from/better than the competition? We were one of the early EMS (Event Management Software) platforms, so we’ve had a lot of time to think about how everything works together and work with event planners one-on-one to perfect how each system is integrated.

Aside from that we work directly with many of our clients to make their events a success. Our system is designed to be as hands-on or hands-off as possible. Some clients take the bull by the horns and figure things out on their own, while others prefer we guide them through the process.

We’ve also designed every tool to be as customizable as possible so that an organization can set it up the way they need to use it. Our Abstract Scorecard, for example, was built to collect and review call for papers submissions. Now we have customers using it for all sorts of things: awards programs, grants submissions, etc.

And we’re always trying to make the system better. We’re always working to make things integrate seamlessly across our own platform when we introduce new products and with other vendors.

What is the single coolest feature of your product? It’s something I’ve talked a lot about: the fact that our EMS platform is completely integrated. Each of CadmiumCD’s products serves a different function specific to a certain stage of event planning, but at the end of the day they’re all connected.

Anything else we need to know? Yes! We love this industry. A good product is made by passionate people. Many of our employees were attendees, exhibitors, and meeting planners before they worked at CadmiumCD (and they still are!), so we understand the events industry from head to toe.

We’re MPI and IAEE members who work hard and have lots of fun. You’ll find us at industry events passionately talking about event tech, meeting planning, and live events in general.

This weekly series spotlights a new tech tool that is designed to help make planning events much more seamless. Whether it’s using event software to track every detail from start to finish or mobile apps that deliver content to attendees’ fingertips, these technologies allow planners to divert their stress to more critical issues like deciding which napkin color looks best.