Anyone using Splash app for event management?

[Amy_Goldfine]

One of my team members came across an app called Splash that manages event registration and checkins and syncs to Marketo. We might be interested in something like this. Has anyone used it? I'd love to hear from another Marketo user about how the integration works, and if the checkin app is any good. We have a process to manage it right now with our own webforms, and then uploading attendance lists after, so it's not urgent, but having something more automated is appealing. On the other hand, it's another integration to manage!

[Josh_Hill13]

There are some threads on it. Marketo's pretty close with them.

[Amy_Goldfine]

Hi Josh—glad to hear that they have a good relationship with Marketo. I could only find one thread where they're mentioned, do you know of any more?

[Anonymous]

Hey Amy! We're currently using the Splash<>Marketo integration through an enterprise Splash account, and it's working pretty well.

There aren't any other community articles or threads that I can find in Marketo about it - the one you referenced is the only one I can find, too.

Personally, I find the check-in app to to be a much smoother experience than the Marketo check-in app -- plus it works on pretty much any device, which comes in extremely handy (Marketo check-in app only works on tablets). The actual setup to capture the data and push from Splash to Marketo is pretty simple, and the sync is usually very quick. We used to use marketo forms and landing pages for our industry events but have recently moved to Splash and it's a better experience from the event-attendee side - there are a lot of other benefits to using Splash outside of the Marketo piece. Ultimately, it depends on the volume of events you're running and whether or not it's worth the added expense for a Splash account.

Are you just looking to automate the registration and check-in process? Have you tried using the Marketo check-in app?

[Amy_Goldfine]

Right now we only run a few events per year, but we're considering increasing that number considerably. We're looking to streamline the whole process, include landing page setup and attendee checkin.

[Anonymous]

Amy Connor I really like using Splash (for the most part) and my team finds it much easier to create landing pages and event-specific emails in Splash. One of the major reasons I moved our event assets to Splash and out of Marketo was because of ease of use and scalability alongside the ability to still use Marketo for to manage campaigns and tie in to our SFDC instance. If you're only doing a few events a year, you might want to try out their free version first - Splash isn't the most expensive in the world, but it certainly isn't cheap. The downsides are that you can only have one person logged into the Splash account at a time, and you can't whitelabel the event - for that you need to upgrade (you used to be able to buy those things in one-off pieces, but they changed the way they worked about a year ago). You might also need to use a Zap instead of the out-of-the-box integration with a free version - we ended up doing import/exports into marketo when we were still on the free version because the events we ran in Splash's free version didn't require instant syncs.

Another great thing about Splash is that pretty much anyone can use it and make it look good, and there is a lot of flexibility in the design tools. That was always a frustrating part of creating event landing pages in Marketo - if we wanted to make something new and unique, we'd have to design a whole new template and bring in more resources. With Splash, we can easily modify existing design templates and build our own from scratch without having to get our design team involved. You can also publish events to a "hub", so you can give your sales and marketing teams one place to look for all of their dinners, all of the industry conference events, etc..

There are also other advantages/connectors w/ splash that I'm going to start exploring - for instance, there's a slack integration so I can notify a channel about check-ins, which could be helpful for our sales team. We used the free version for one-off events for about two years before committing to enterprise earlier this year. The events we're running in Splash are typically networking dinners/mixers/happy hours, meet-me-at-X-conference requests, and internal or non-marketing events. We also have a pretty awesome community but we run all of those events through a platform called BevyLabs, which also integrates with Marketo.

[Valerie_Whitin2]

Hi Amy Connor​,

We used Splash in a previous company I worked for. At the time we did not have a Marketo integration, not sure if it even existed at the time. I liked Splash and it was super easy to use and quickly throw together a registration page. We eventually moved off of it onto using Attend, there are other ones out there though that looked just as good. We needed something a little more robust than Splash. Splash is still 1345 times better than the Marketo check-in app  

I do believe by the time I left the company they were still using Splash for internal corporate events though, our HR team thought it was easy enough for them to manage on their own.