Want to collect money for your events?
Struggling to manage registrations for your event and not lose money?
Want a better way to promote your event and utilize social media to do it?
Say Hello To Eventbrite!
How’d they do that?
Have you ever attended a conference and thought to yourself: ”Wow, they did a great job and I learned so much!”.
It takes time, energy and organization to hold a successful event. Many companies struggle with the registration process, using outdated methods like asking people to register via postal mail or email. This puts a huge administrative strain on the organization resulting in overtime, lost registrations and stress. This is why so many people are smiling on the event day; they’re thinking, “We made it!”, lol!
Get paid before your events
Another challenge is collecting payment. After you go to the trouble to promote an event, shouldn’t it be easy for you to get paid by attendees? Again, most organizations are still asking people to mail in payments or are struggling with some sort of online merchant account, Paypal button that doesn’t tie into registration or just asking people to mail checks in. Why wait until the day of the event to get paid? People who pay ahead of time are making a commitment to attend and that makes it easier for you!
Making registration fast and easy
Now you could hire a programmer to come in develop a custom event registration system for your business. I’ve seen several out there which look like they were put together in a way that the registration site looks awkward and just plain confusing.
Break the mold
If you’re still reading this post because you want relief. You’re tired of low registration numbers for your events, lost entries and people getting in who didn’t pay. You would like a system that is fast and easy with no training required.
Eventbrite will rock your event!
Powerhouse for SEO and event promotion
One of the most amazing features of Eventbrite is it’s powerful SEO. When you create an event, you get a customized URL where people can sign up. Eventbrite has swirled in their SEO mojo to make these pages highly optimized for search engines. A few days after I posted my workshop for Microsoft Word training, I noticed hundreds of hits to my event page only to find out I was #4 on Yahoo search for, “microsoft word“!
Eventbrite also has built in functions which make it easy for you to promote you’re event on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook plus when people are done registering, they can tweet or post that they’re going to your event!
Blog and CMS Friendly
Want to sell tickets for an event from your blog? Easy! You can embed event registrations right into your blog posts for a seamless look. They also have code snippets that will rotate your upcoming events in the sidebar. Great way to post events in your WordPress, Blogger or Typepad blog.
Looking to list events on your Joomla or Drupal website? Never fear! Eventbrite works here as well and you can customize the colors of your event page to match your website. Your event registrations are secure as Eventbrite uses SSL through the entire check out so your registration info is safe.
Free event? Free for you too!
Eventbrite has an interesting fee structure. Events that you hold for free don’t cost you anything. If you charge for the events then you are charged:
Eventbrite fee
You pay this fee every time you charge for an event.
- 2.5% of ticket price plus $0.99 for each ticket sold
Payment processing
You pay one of these fees to accept electronic payments for your event. You can also choose to accept payments offline or at your event in which case you won’t pay a processing fee.
- Eventbrite is 3% per transaction
- Paypal is about 2.5% + $0.30 per transaction
- Google checkout is about 2.5% + $.30 per transaction
Who’s using it?
- Thousands of Wordcamp events
- Hundreds of Barcamp events
- Social Media events
- Green confereneces
- SEO workshops
- Colleges, Fortune 500′s, Nonprofits and more!
Humanity’s Greatest Challenges was held at NASA’s Ames Research park in July where the leading experts in our environment gathered to discuss how we could develop and maintain more sustainable ways of living
Mashable held their Social Good conference via Eventbrite in New York City to educate people on the four charities chosen for the Summer of Social Good campaign; Livestrong, Humane Society, Oxfam America and WWF.
Techcrunch’s annual event to feature new an innovative companies is known as TechCrunch50. For those of you who know, the tickets to this conference are $3,000 each so that speaks volumes that Techcrunch rolls with Eventbrite!
Savannah State University held several trainings on ADP payroll software to bring staff up to speed on their transition to the new service.
Summary
I started looking for a tool that would help me easily and quickly allow people to register for my live, online training at Freshworkshops. I didn’t want people to fool around with signing up and needed a way to quickly communicate with attendees. I needed the process to be as automated as possible so I didn’t have to babysit registrations. I found Eventbrite and fell in love!
It’s so easy that I can setup a new training workshop in under 15 minutes. I sold my first ticket within a few days of posting the training. It rocks to wake up and see people have signed up for my technology workshops!
If you’re using some archaic, old system for registrations, you need to have a serious staff meeting, move your conferences to Eventbrite and start making money!
Photo credit: Gnerk, Davemedia
