The Vision of SeeUthere

By E.J. Siwek, CMP

SeeUthere’s investment in software engineers and product development is obviously paying off.

SeeUthere Corporation was started in 1998 by a management team with deep experience in building startup companies and bringing them public. To date, their management team has taken five technology companies public and it appears that the foundation for bringing SeeUthere public is well on its way. The Santa-Clara, Calif.-based company has 100 employees, 60 percent of whom are devoted to product development, IT, or software engineering. To date, the company has received more than $34 million in venture capital. The product found at www.seeuthere.com is targeted to corporate and association meeting professionals. Some of its competitors include www.be-there.com, www.Cvent.com, www.event411.com, and www.regweb.com.

SeeUthere is built around three primary modules: automation tools, event marketing, and a global attendee database. As with many of their competitors, the site is highly template driven with pre-designed layout available for the meeting professional to get a site up and running in as little as 24 hours. Its automation tools are focused on automating online registration and event management. With its online registration tool you can either allow registration to be made from a pre-populated invitation list or your staff can manually enter a person’s name. The toolbar on the site allows you to navigate to several areas including My seeUthere, a Web page summary of your current or prior events. Other areas include:

Create Event. This option provides templates for creating several types of events ranging from conferences, marketing related events, meetings, or speaker forums. Your event’s theme drives several additional options for customizing your site. Clearly, this is where much of the power can be found on the site. The templates and their varying degrees of options allow sites to get up and running very quickly. After you select a theme, you then enter event details, design your site’s page, build an invitee list, customize an e-mail invitation complete with program information, build your registration form, and populate an accommodations page.

In addition, an advanced options page allows you to set a schedule for sending reminder messages, postcards, faxes, or letters electronically or through traditional mail. This section also allows you to print mailing labels or name badges. You can also direct how messages are received, who is notified and when, and who gets to see certain parts of the site.

Manage Event. This section allows you to see registration counts for your various functions and to manually enter an attendee from mail- or fax-back invitations. By selecting an event from your list of either active or draft events, you are brought to that event’s summary page. (Draft events are those events that aren’t live or where the information has yet to be released.) To see the marketing activities that have been active for this event, you would click the “stats” button and it will provide a summary of the activities completed to date.

Address Book. Here you can group your marketing list by departments, committees, geographic regions, hobbies, or however you wish to. You can manually enter names or import names from OutLook Express, Outlook, Netscape, or through a CSV format (comma separated values) that allows you to import data from any database. From this section you can also send broadcast e-mails and export names into other applications. The address book is also the place to visit other meeting industry venues and vendors.

Reports. This section provides online access to review revenue reports, see updates on accommodations and how your room block is progressing, review the status of meal counts, be brought up to date on any online surveys you may have sent to your marketing list, or check on registration counts. In all cases, these reports can be selected by event and date range, and viewed while online or exported into other applications through a CSV export format.

Communications. This area of the site allows you to send broadcast e-mails to any group you choose. Taking advantage of more recent technology, seeUthere can also enable your site to accept wireless communications using WAN protocols. This allows registrants or you as the host to access and manage information via cell phone or Internet-ready devices such as a Palm Pilot.

SeeUthere’s well-designed, robust, and intuitive product makes it a site to add to your list when shopping for services. The investment in software engineers and product development is obviously paying off. According to Helen Loh, seeUthere’s vice president of marketing, the site has thus far processed a half million invitations and has handled approximately 100,000 registrations. Pricing is set on a subscription-based program and is based on the number of transactions. For those organizations requiring deeply customized services in order to blend with existing Web sites, design services are available.

Synergen is one organization using seeUthere. Cathy McCause, Synergen’s marketing director, reports that her clients loved the functionality of the system. She reported that after using seeUthere, conference registrations were up 46 percent and registration fee revenue climbed a full 70 percent.

For more information: www. seeUthere.com, 3920 Freedom Circle, Suite 200, Santa Clara, CA 95054 Voice: (408) 562-3388 or Fax: (408) 562-3386

E.J. Siwek is director of marketing of Excel Partnership, an international training organization, and president and founder of Flashpoint Technologies, LLC. Forward your questions about technology to him at techeditor@pcma.org.

CONVENE - May 2001 - Meeting Technology

©2001 Professional Convention Management Association