The University lacked a central event management system. Each area of the University managed and communicated their events using a range of communication methods. This meant a lot of additional and unnecessary overheads and wasted time for both the event organisers as well as attendees.As a result, events were not as effectively promoted as they could be. In addition, in many cases, event promotion was operating as a separate system to events registrations.

The Marketing and Communications Office at Flinders University started developing a set of requirements, liaising with the various statekeholders and started work on the development of a system.

After working closely with the Marketing and Communication Office we designed a University-wide Online Event Management System which addressed their business needs and exceeded their functional requirement. Some of the features that the Event Management System has are listed below:

• Multi-level administration privileges to manage event publication and registration;
• Online payment and registration system catering for different types of events, including guest registrations and waiting list;
• Accounting reporting for use by the Financial Services Division;
• Extensive search methods, including integration with Google Search Appliance and search using cloud tags, by faculty and audience, and event type filtering and RSS feeds;
• Extensive event management options including featured events, event creation wizard, archiving and reporting.

The University is experiencing the following benefits as a result of their new system:

• Significant reduction in duplicated and unnecessary work and use of resources;
• Events now have increased exposure across the entire University;
• Much less effort is required to promote events;
• The system is easy to use so more events are being created;
• Decreased management overheads and a significant improvement in time efficiency from the Marketing and Communications Office;
• Events information is easier to locate on the website;
• Fantastic search and browse options, and use of RSS feeds allow other systems to integrate the latest events notifications, which creates better communication across the University.