When you roll out an event app, you’re not just turning on a new feature. You’re changing how attendees navigate your event, how sponsors get visibility, and how your team manages day-of communication. Cvent Attendee Hub is designed to make that shift feel manageable instead of overwhelming, whether this is your first event or your fiftieth.
This guide walks through what you can expect from onboarding, training, support, and timing, and it answers the most common questions we hear from planners and prospects evaluating Attendee Hub.
Attendee Hub onboarding process
While the details flex by package and event type, most Attendee Hub onboarding journeys follow the same basic arc: kickoff and strategy, configuration and build, pre-event preparation, and event day and beyond.
It usually starts about six or more weeks before your event with a kickoff conversation. In that call, you and your Cvent team talk through your goals, your event format (in-person, hybrid, or virtual), and which Attendee Hub features you plan to use. You’ll also align on responsibilities, timelines, and who is responsible for which parts of the build, so there are no surprises later on.
From there, you move into configuration and build, typically four to six weeks before your event start date. This is where sessions, speakers, exhibitors and sponsors, appointments, surveys, and graphics are added to Attendee Hub. If you’re on the standard onboarding path, your team does the configuration and your Cvent experts guide you with training, self-service resources, and milestone calls so you can ask “how do I…?” questions as you go. The goal is to have configuration wrapped at least a week before your event so that final stretch can be all about testing and promotion, not scrambling in the backend.
A week or so out, you’ll typically have a pre-event or dry-run style call. That time is used to walk through the full attendee experience, review key settings, and, where applicable, practice live session flows so speakers and hosts know exactly what event day will feel like. It’s also a checkpoint to confirm you’re ready to go onsite or online with Attendee Hub.
Once the event is live, your team leans on 24/7 Cvent Customer Support for urgent technical issues, while your onboarding or project manager (depending on your package) focuses on execution and making sure you get the most out of the app during the event. Afterward, you’ll have an opportunity to review metrics like logins and feature usage and talk about what you want to do differently next time.
Timeline for building and launching an event app
Timelines vary by event size and complexity, but there are some helpful benchmarks. Many customers spend three to eight weeks building and launching their registration and core event setup. On top of that, Cvent recommends planning for at least five weeks for Attendee Hub configuration once your event and registration are built and live. That configuration window is usually concentrated in the four to six weeks before your event start date.
Practically speaking, if you begin your Attendee Hub onboarding around eight to ten weeks before your event, you give yourself enough room for training, configuration, dry runs, and promotion without rushing. For more complex programs with many tracks, global audiences, or extensive sponsorship packages, starting even earlier is smart.
Training resources for planners and attendees
One of the biggest benefits of working with Cvent is that you’re not left to figure Attendee Hub out on your own. There’s a full ecosystem of training for planners and practical guidance for attendees.
For planners and event teams, the Attendee Hub Learning Center on Cvent Community acts as a central hub. You’ll find “getting started” content like the Attendee Hub Quick Start Guide, “Your Attendee Hub Onboarding Journey,” feature lists, and glossaries, plus deeper dives into configuration, engagement, sponsorship, and reporting. It’s designed to walk you from first login to confident power user over time.
That’s paired with structured training paths and courses in Cvent Academy. Examples include “Attendee Hub – Getting Started,” “Attendee Hub: Using the Attendee Website,” and “Attendee Hub: Using the Event App.” These combine video-based lessons and hands-on exercises so you can follow along in your own account or a demo environment. Many onboarding journeys require or strongly recommend these trainings before certain milestone calls, so you’re using one-on-one time for strategy and nuance instead of basic navigation.
You can also join live public webinars led by product experts. Those sessions mirror real-world scenarios like running a hybrid conference or adding virtual components to an in-person event, and they give you a chance to ask questions in real time. For planners who want to go a step further, Attendee Hub Certification lets you validate your knowledge of the platform.
For attendees, you can point people to friendly, step-by-step help in the Community and Cvent’s knowledge base, including how-to videos and “Teach Attendees to Use…” style content. Your Cvent team can also share best-practice recommendations for what to include in pre-event emails, “know before you go” pages, and onsite signage so attendees understand why they should use the app and how to get started in a few taps.
Demo and sandbox options
Yes. Cvent understands that most teams want a safe place to explore Attendee Hub before they touch their real event data.
As part of onboarding, customers are often encouraged to download or work with a demo event. That makes it easy to practice configuration, experiment with graphics and page layouts, and see how attendee-facing features behave without impacting anything in production.
If you’re still in the evaluation phase and haven’t purchased yet, you can also request a short demo directly from the Attendee Hub product page on cvent.com to see the experience in action and ask questions live.
Support options (24/7, phone, chat, email)
Once your event is live, you need to know that help is there if something doesn’t go as planned. With Cvent, support is designed around the reality that events don’t keep regular office hours.
Cvent offers 24/7 global Customer Support, so you can reach someone around the clock for urgent issues, especially during live events. You can contact support by phone or through the online Support Center, where you can log and track cases and tap into a large knowledge base of product articles and how-tos.
Beyond the core support team, you also benefit from Cvent Community, which functions as a peer-to-peer help network. There are active Attendee Hub discussion forums where planners share tips, workflows, and practical solutions to edge cases they’ve already solved. For many day-to-day “how would you handle this?” questions, Community is a quick way to get advice from people in similar roles.
Depending on your package and customer tier, you may also work with a Client Success resource, a Live Solutions Specialist, or a dedicated Attendee Hub 360 project team. Those contacts focus less on troubleshooting and more on onboarding, feature adoption, and long-term program health, and they work alongside Support rather than replacing it.
Attendee support during the event
Yes, and this is an area where Attendee Hub 360 and related services can take a lot of pressure off your internal team.
If you contract Attendee Hub 360 – Onsite Support, a trained Cvent resource comes onsite and typically staffs an Attendee Help Desk or similar station. Their main job is to support your attendees directly with the event app and Attendee Hub website. That can include helping people download and log into the app, troubleshooting issues on individual devices, answering questions about where to find content or how a feature works, sending push notifications, making minor content tweaks, and providing you with daily reports on usage so you can see how things are going in near real time.
If you don’t have onsite services, you still have access to 24/7 Cvent Customer Support for event-day issues, and your onboarding or project contact can help you think through contingency plans and communication if anything unexpected happens. In that model, your own staff typically handle attendee questions directly, but with Cvent backing you up behind the scenes.
DIY onboarding vs. Attendee Hub 360
A simple way to think about it is this: with DIY Attendee Hub, you build with Cvent guidance. With Attendee Hub 360, Cvent builds and executes with you.
In the standard, DIY-style onboarding, your team owns the configuration of Attendee Hub. That means you are the ones setting up sessions, speakers, exhibitors and sponsors, appointments, surveys, and graphics. Cvent provides a structured onboarding experience that includes a kickoff call, access to self-paced training and public webinars, a series of configuration milestone calls, and a pre-event dry-run prep call. You also have an hour of event-day access to your specialist and 24/7 Customer Support as your first line of defense. The end goal is that you’re not just getting through one event, but becoming confident and self-sufficient in Attendee Hub for future programs as well.
Attendee Hub 360, by contrast, is a professional services offering designed for organizations that want a deeper partnership and more hands-on help. With Attendee Hub 360, you have a dedicated Project Manager who oversees each phase of your event lifecycle: overall strategy, event build and promotion, day-of execution, and post-event reporting. The Cvent team takes on much or all of the Attendee Hub configuration work itself, which can include session build-out, speaker and exhibitor setup, appointments, survey configuration, and graphics, as well as Cvent Studio session support when that’s part of your scope.
Your Project Manager will also help create detailed run-of-show plans, host or coordinate dry runs for key sessions, manage live support on event day, and pull together post-event reporting. You can add further services like attendee-facing onsite support, webcast production, and video editing if you want to elevate the production quality of your sessions even more.
DIY is usually the right path when you have time and staff to own the build and want to build internal expertise. Attendee Hub 360 tends to be a better fit for high-stakes, complex, or resource-constrained programs where you’d rather have Cvent carry more of the operational load.
Getting help with technical issues or feature questions
Where you start depends on the kind of help you need and how time-sensitive it is.
If something is broken or appears to be malfunctioning, especially during your event, your first stop should be Cvent Customer Support. Because support is available 24/7, you can reach someone quickly to help diagnose issues with logins, performance, configuration problems, or other technical hurdles that need immediate attention.
If you’re in build or planning mode and your questions are more “how do I set this up?” than “why isn’t this working?”, the Attendee Hub Learning Center and knowledge base articles are often the fastest way to get answers. They walk through common workflows in a step-by-step way and usually include screenshots or short videos. When you want more context or real-world ideas, the Attendee Hub discussion forum in Community is a great place to see how other planners are tackling similar scenarios.
For deeper questions about strategy or feature fit, your Live Solutions Specialist, Client Success contact, or Attendee Hub 360 Project Manager (if you have one) can help you look at your event goals and make recommendations. That might include things like which engagement tools to prioritize, how to structure your agenda for the app, or how to phase in new features across multiple events rather than trying everything at once.
Best practices for launching and promoting the app
There are, and the most successful launches tend to treat the app as a central part of the event experience from day one, not as an afterthought once everything else is locked.
A common best practice is to introduce Attendee Hub right in registration and on your event website. When people sign up, they should immediately understand that the app is how they’ll build their personal agenda, receive updates, network, and access on-demand content. The Attendee Hub content in Cvent’s Day-of Event and Learning Center resources includes guidance like “Your Attendee Hub Onboarding Journey,” the “Attendee Hub Journey of a Mobile App,” and “How to Market Your Attendee Hub Event App” to help you position things clearly and consistently.
From there, weave app promotion into your communication plan. Confirmation emails, reminder emails, and “know before you go” messages are all natural spots to explain what attendees can do with the app, provide download or access links, and share quick tips to get started. Short teaser videos or screenshots of favorite features can make it feel more tangible and less abstract.
Onsite, make it as easy as possible to get into the app. QR codes on signage, check-in counters, and slide decks are great for this, as long as you test them ahead of time. Some customers choose to add a quick mention of the app to general session walk-in slides or MC scripts so everyone hears the same simple instructions for logging in and building their agenda. Cvent’s best-practice content also suggests briefing your staff and volunteers so they’re comfortable answering basic questions about the app throughout the venue.
Finally, don’t forget to highlight engagement features. When attendees know they can participate in live polling, ask questions, join discussions, earn points through gamification, or capture AI-powered Session Snapshots directly in the app, they’re far more likely to open it again and again rather than treating it like a static digital brochure.
Driving adoption and engagement among attendees
Adoption and engagement are closely connected: if attendees understand that the app is valuable and easy, they will download it. If they have reasons to come back to it multiple times a day, their engagement naturally follows.
A strong approach starts with positioning the app as the single source of truth for the event. That means the latest agenda, room changes, maps, know-before-you-go content, and announcements all live inside Attendee Hub and its associated event app, not scattered across PDFs and last-minute emails. When attendees learn that the app is where they go to know what’s happening now and what’s coming next, they quickly form the habit of checking it first.
Layer on benefits that are only available in the app. For example, Attendee Hub can offer AI-powered networking and personalized session recommendations, in-app messaging, live Q&A and polling, and features like Session Snapshots that help in-person attendees capture key session moments with a single tap. When people realize the app isn’t just a schedule but effectively an assistant for their time onsite, engagement jumps.
Gamification is another powerful lever. By creating challenges that reward actions like checking into sessions, visiting sponsor pages, answering polls, or completing surveys, you can gently nudge attendees toward the behaviors that matter most for your event while giving them a fun reason to keep the app open. Success stories in the Learning Center and Community show how organizations use simple game mechanics to boost everything from exhibitor traffic to survey response rates.
Finally, think beyond the event dates. With Attendee Hub, you can turn your app and attendee website into an always-on content hub, surfacing on-demand recordings, CE credit tracking, and follow-up resources long after the doors close. That gives attendees a reason to come back to the app for weeks or months, and it turns one event into an ongoing engagement channel instead of a one-off touchpoint.
Bringing it all together
Cvent Attendee Hub is built to meet you where you are. If you want to own your app build and develop internal expertise, the standard onboarding path gives you structured guidance, training, and support without taking control away from your team. If you’d rather have experts take on more of the configuration and execution risk, Attendee Hub 360 layers in project management, build services, webcast support, and even attendee-facing onsite help.
Either way, you get a clear onboarding process, dedicated training resources for planners and attendees, access to demo and preview tools, 24/7 support, and a set of best practices for launching, promoting, and growing adoption of your event app over time. With the right lead time and the right mix of services, Attendee Hub can quickly shift from “another thing to manage” to one of the easiest ways to keep your attendees informed, engaged, and eager to come back.
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