Yapp: The Budget-Friendly Event App [Review]

Yapp: What Is It?

Yapp is a do-it-yourself platform that allows you to easily create, edit, and instantly publish mobile apps that are compatible with both iOS and Android Devices. Yapp is a container app, which means that you do not have to wait for approval from the app store, it can go live and be made available straight away.

The app is priced competitively, which will appeal to any event with a limited budget or cost-saving approach. It is particularly suitable for association events, sales meetings, conferences, and employee training.

Yapp is designed with non-technical users in mind. It offers mobile app creation without going through the pain, time, and cost of having to build a branded app from scratch. The price point is attractive enough to allow event planners who have never used an event app before to create and test it out.

Liking the sound of this event app? Read on to find out what it can offer.

THE MAIN CATEGORIES OF FEATURES ARE:

Event Information. Publish the app immediately and determine whether the content within is private or public. Add unlimited pages and send unlimited push notifications.

Agendas and Schedules. Customize the schedule for your event, including single and multiple-day events and tracks.

Attendee Interaction. Populate the event social feed with photos, comments, and questions from attendees. Set up quick polls and surveys.

Customize Your App. Brand the app through splash screens, colors, a custom event app URL and by adding images, floor plans and maps of the venue.

Review

Yapp apps can be customized to precise colors to match your event branding and the exact color scheme. For the splash screen image, many event planners are choosing to upload a picture with text added over the top for a modern look and feel.

Yapp offers a free trial for 14 days with no credit card required. The draft mode allows you to preview the app and you can install it on up to 10 devices to test it before you activate the app. After publishing, there is no limit to the number of installs.

PROMOTING THE APP

There are three ways you can set up your app:

Public app – the app is shared and open to anyone with the URL.

Public but with authentication required – details, such as email or phone, need to be entered to use the app.

Private – the app is only available to specific contacts. If you are not approved you cannot access the app.

Yapp allows you to create a custom link, which will be similar to this: my.yapp.us/eventname. This smart link and your uniquely generated QR code will take you to a pre-populated version of the app.

For public apps the share option is built in, with the option for users to share via social media and text message. Within the app, you can include a ticket link to ‘buy now’ so anyone that has found your application and is interested in your event can be encouraged to buy tickets. This means that the app can be used as a marketing tool.

You can see an install count and those who have downloaded but haven’t installed the app. It is also possible to revoke access from anyone that you don’t want to give permission to use the app.

SCHEDULE

The event program can be as simple or detailed as you need it, with one or multiple days and tracks. You can specify the color coding to make the schedule easy to follow.

Any item that is scheduled can have speaker details added and documents can be attached to the session. The venue location and room can be specified. The attendee can add sessions they are interested in to their personal schedule.

SPEAKERS AND ATTENDEES

You can create multiple people tabs which can be used to detail speakers, attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors. This allows you to categorize and showcase important people at your event by including photos or logos, names, titles, links, and bios or descriptions.

This information can be imported from CSV or pulled an individual setting up their profile can pull information from LinkedIn. Once an individual is listed within the app they are searchable and can be found and added into the program easily by the event planner setting up the app.

DOCUMENTS AND VIDEOS

Videos can be embedded from both YouTube and Vimeo. PDFs and Word documents can be uploaded for your users to reference, read, download and share. They can view them within the app, save it to their mobile devices, or email to read later on their computer.

SOCIAL FEED

The social feed can engage event attendees by allowing them to post photos, comments and questions and also ‘like’ and reply to posts by other attendees.

Afterward, you can export all photos from the Yapp dashboard. If you don’t want everyone to upload photos you can specify that photo upload is by admin only.

On the Team package, you can require that all Social Feed content is approved by an admin before being shown if you wish, to protect from inappropriate posts, photos, and comments.

TWITTER AND HASHTAG FEED
Twitter handles and hashtags that are relevant to your event can be added so they feed right into the app. You can add multiple Twitter handles and accounts to one page, and as many Twitter hashtags as you like to collate the activity into one place.

POLL

You can collect anonymous opinions with a simple poll to gather feedback, thoughts, and votes. A poll can hold one question and an unlimited number of multiple choice options.

It is only possible to activate one poll at a time, so you need to ask the first poll question to the audience, then a second poll question can be asked. Different polls cannot be asked in different sessions at the same time. For more detailed surveys you can link to an online survey platform to get more details responses.

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

Push notifications can be broadcast to show up on users’ home screens. Important news updates and schedule changes can be communicated to your attendees to keep them in the loop. A Waldorf Astoria in Florida was even able to use Yapp to communicate with its employees in this way after an evacuation.

GALLERY AND VENUE APP

A venue map or floor plan can be uploaded and, although it isn’t fully interactive, it can be operated using pinch and zoom.

The gallery page is where static photos can be uploaded, like maps, press images, and assets that users can view in your app. Photos can be viewed full-screen and saved onto your users’ devices.

ANALYTICS

Basic analytics are available on the higher pricing tiers and gives basic stats, such as the number of Android vs Apple devices that have installed the app.

TEAMS

Multiple apps can be contained within one account for different events. Access can be enabled for different teams, as required. This means you can give access to specific apps to an agency that needs to add content, safe in the knowledge that they cannot see, access or make changes to other event apps on your account.

Features

Event Information

• Publish immediately – no app store approval needed
• Ability to make the app private or public
• Add unlimited pages
• Make unlimited updates and changes
• Send unlimited push notifications

Agendas and Schedules

• Customize the schedule or agenda for your event
• Content import for schedules, speakers and sponsors
• Single or multi-day programs
• Differentiate different tracks

Attendee Interaction

• Sharing tools to enable attendee networking during an event via the social feed
• Option for moderation
• Picture upload
• Export images
• Polls
• Attendee surveys

Customize Your App

• Add a custom splash screen
• Customize colors to the event branding
• Create the custom URL to share the app
• Share images, floor plans and maps of the event venue

Who Is It For?

Event planners and association managers that want to create a simple mobile app to better communicate with their users, employees, or other stakeholders will be interested in Yapp. No technical knowledge is needed, it is very simple to set up and publish. Organizations from small non-profit associations to large enterprises are attracted by the pricing structure.

PROS AND CONS

Pros

Do-it-yourself model, with easy setup

Ability to create an app quickly and publish it immediately, with no wait for approvals

A fraction of the cost of many event apps

Cons

Lack of gamification features

One-to-one messaging between attendees is not available

Maps are not interactive

Pricing and Plans

Yapp offers transparent pricing, with three plans for a single event app:

BASIC $399

CORE $499

TEAM $599

The packages depend on whether you need private events, analytics, content upload, and multiple admins. There is also volume pricing if you are planning to have a number of apps throughout the year.

IN CONCLUSION

Yapp is a simple and accessible event mobile app to suit all budgets. If you are looking for a do-it-yourself app that you can publish instantly without waiting for approval from the app store you should check out Yapp and the free 14-day trial (no credit card details required).

Disclaimer: Reviews are paid for placements. While Event Manager Blog receives a fee to extensively look at the tool and review it in detail, the content of the review is independent and by no means influenced by the company. If you have any questions please use the contact us section.