Eventleaf Guide

Review by eFreeware

Conferences and trade shows hand attendees a lot of material: a schedule that shifts, session rooms that move, speaker bios, exhibitor lists and documents you are meant to read before you arrive. Carrying all of that in printed form is awkward, and a printed agenda is out of date the moment a session is rescheduled. Eventleaf Guide is built to put that material on a phone or tablet instead, and it is published by Jolly Technologies Inc as a free download for attendees.

The app sits on the attendee side of the Eventleaf platform, which is the important thing to understand before installing it. It is not a tool for organizing an event; it is what you open once you have registered for one that uses the platform. Event details and documents can be viewed on a phone or tablet.

What the attendee actually gets

The core of the app is the event program. You can view the agenda, open individual sessions for their details, and pull up the documents attached to them. There is also a check-in step for sessions, which sits alongside the timetable.

Around that core sits the reference material you would otherwise collect in a tote bag. Speaker profiles, exhibitor listings and sponsor information are all available in the app, along with details about the event itself and the venue. For anyone deciding which talk to attend next or which booth to visit, having those in one place is the obvious convenience.

The app also carries a social layer. You can send messages to other attendees and to speakers, and schedule meetings with people who are at the same event. That turns it from a schedule viewer into something closer to a lightweight networking tool, though how much use you get from it depends on how many other attendees are active in the app at the same event.

Feedback, polls and staying informed

Organizers often want input while an event is running, and the app covers that with polls and surveys. You can respond to both, and you can rate sessions, speakers and the event as a whole. If you are the sort of attendee who fills in the feedback form at the end of a talk, this puts it in the same place as the talk itself.

The app also covers event information, which is the feature I would value most at a large, multi-day gathering. Room changes and last-minute schedule adjustments are exactly the kind of information that is painful to miss, and having it in one place is the practical argument for installing it before you travel.

Connecting with other attendees is a further option, which fits the messaging and meeting tools already mentioned. Taken together, the app is trying to be the single place an attendee looks during an event: program, people, documents and announcements.

What it asks of you

The main condition is that the event you are attending has to be on the Eventleaf platform. The app is a companion to that system, so its usefulness is tied to whether the organizer has set things up there. If your event uses something else, the app has nothing to show you.

The other thing to note is the reception so far. It has been downloaded more than 10,000 times and holds a 3.1 average from 25 ratings, which is a modest score on a small sample. I would not read too much into a number that size either way, but it does suggest the experience has not delighted everyone who tried it.

On the commercial side there is nothing to weigh. The app is free, so there is no spending decision to make before you use it. That is a straightforward proposition for something you may only open during a handful of events a year.

Who this fits

This is for the person holding a ticket, not the person running the show. If you are attending a conference, a corporate gathering or a trade show that runs on Eventleaf, the app gives you the agenda, the documents, the speaker and exhibitor lists and the venue details in one place, plus a way to message people and arrange to meet them.

It also suits attendees who want to give feedback without hunting for a form, since polls, surveys and ratings live alongside the sessions they refer to. Anyone who prefers to keep their event schedule on a phone rather than in a printed booklet is the natural audience.

I would expect it to be least useful to someone whose event is not managed through the platform, simply because there would be no event content to view. That is a question of fit rather than quality, and it is worth confirming before you download.

A free companion worth having on hand

Eventleaf Guide does one job: it puts the program, documents, people and announcements for an Eventleaf event onto your device. The feature set covers the practical needs of an attendee across a multi-day event, and the messaging and meeting tools add a networking angle that many schedule apps leave out.

The limits are structural rather than irritating. It only works with events on the Eventleaf platform, and its 3.1 average from 25 ratings is a reminder that a small install base gives a thin picture of how it performs in practice. Neither of those is a reason to avoid it if your event is supported.

If you are attending an event that uses Eventleaf, there is little reason not to install it before you go: it is free.