It's made almost entirely for event managers and promoters, focusing on ticketing, promoting, and then managing the event in question. It's sold at a flat rate, rather than by ticket volume/sales, as most ticketing sites are, and has several features to match the three major tasks it covers.
First, all of your sites for each event are fully branded, and their site pages can be customized so that you are in effect the source of everything customers are seeing. This means that you can integrate the service into an existing promotional site, use the service to build a promotional site, or both.
It has solid customer-interaction and contact tools like email list building and event invites and reminders. Add to that the ability to promote through affiliates, special discount offers, and even sponsor sales and things start to look useful. Now throw in some social media networking and you have promotion almost completely covered with Ettend.
On the other side, you also have ticketing and total management of the event, including RSVPs (instead of or in addition to sold tickets). Ettend also collects the money via credit cards, PayPal, Google Checkout, or your Authorize.net account. From this comes real-time reporting of attendance RSVPs, sales, and affiliate tracking.
Finally, you can also blog, post photos in a gallery, and post surveys for events.
The app has been in development for three years and recently went live with a flat $24-per-month fee and a free trial with signup to get started. Ettend was founded by Rick Reich and is based in Fort Lauderdale.
Reich said his motivation for building this app was simple: "We managed events for clients and ourselves and looked at the tools already available in the market (some good, some bad). We could have used a few other options, but we couldn't get over the total cost of an event being based on how many tickets were sold -- just ask any ticket buyer/seller how they feel about paying ticket fees! So we successfully built a complete event management and registration tool that any individual, nonprofit, small business, or large company could easily use and, after a fully featured free trial, offer straightforward pricing starting at $24 a month."
