Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I'm eager to get going with some new projects and the projects that I'm eager to get going
on are event-based products.
So today we are going to take a look at the event management system Eventbrite on DottoTech.
Way back in the early days with this channel, one of the very first demos I ever did was
on a tool that I was just enamored with.
It’s called Eventbrite and to me it was a breath of fresh air.
Here was this tool that would allow us to create an event and manage all of the different
aspects of that event, from tickets, to sales, to letting people know the location, to marketing
the event, giving us marketing tools that we could share on social media, all from a
single dashboard and the best part?
All free.
There were online ticketing systems built into it.
It was just an absolute stroke of genius, I thought, and I still think it is.
Well, that was about three years ago when I first did that demo and I haven’t really
looked at Eventbrite for you since.
So I think it’s about time you and I took a wee gander at Eventbrite and as it happens,
I am just planning a little live event right now so we can use that as a basis so you can
see how I'm actually using it to manage my event.
Signing up for Eventbrite is free.
You go to their site.
You sign in.
It’s a free account.
Once you’ve signed up for it, you’re brought into a dashboard area where you can manage
your event and do other sort of administrative things.
Let’s go in and let’s take a look at our event itself.
Let’s go in and manage the event.
Now what the event is that I'm actually going to take you into right now is a master class
that I'm going to be doing at the front end of a social media conference coming up in
Victoria.
I'm going to be doing a little YouTube and video master class.
We’ve just created this so it’s just about ready to be promoted.
I'm really at the stage where I'm just about to launch this idea.
Now this event all began with me clicking on the Create Event button within Eventbrite
which allowed me to start to create the architecture of my event.
In here, it’s dead simple.
You just basically go through and fill in the blanks, giving your event a title, putting
in the location and of course the beauty is as soon as you put in the location, it looks
up the map information and it provides a map in the different landing pages for the software.
All of this is done for you so you’re not constantly bringing different elements together.
Instead, Eventbrite through the Q and A of filling up the form allows you to incorporate
all of the different relevant content that somebody attending your event is going to
be looking for.
You work your way through.
You add an event image.
You create some graphics.
You give it a description as you’d expect and then you get into the ticket area.
Now tickets can be free or they can be paid for.
If you use free tickets then Eventbrite makes no money from your interaction.
If you go for paid tickets.
Eventbrite will actually charge for the tickets, connect to your own e-commerce accounts to
transfer the money into PayPal or some other system, and they will take their percentage
cut from the ticket sales.
That’s how Eventbrite ultimately makes their money.
But you basically can create your tickets and you can do things like creating discount
codes and early bird offers.
You can limit the number of tickets that are available.
You can do all of those sorts of things.
The beauty part is when people purchase your ticket, the ticket at Eventbrite they then
have an e-ticket that they have on their phone that you can use your phone or you can use
another gathering system at the door to register people.
So it’s a complete ecosystem to manage the entire event.
Then you determine the privacy settings, when you’re going to be setting a page public,
etc. and you do all of that in the initial composition of setting up your event.
Once you’ve done that, it will look like mine all ready to go.
Let’s just go in and let’s look at the design side of my event.
Here we see how all of that information that we’ve put into those fields resolves or
begins to resolve.
At this point here, I can modify this depending on where it’s going to be placed.
You can see I've got my description field.
I've got a little bonus thing here.
I've got the map of where it’s going to be.
I've got my tickets and pricing and the order form all available right here.
And they handle all of the e-commerce transaction side so you don’t have to worry about having
your own Paypal account as far as for purchasing or your own merchant account.
Eventbrite manages all of that.
Then if I choose to, I can change the overall look here.
I can change the theme and you can even get in and kind of design some custom text and
some custom graphics, if you want.
I just like the nice clean lines.
It matches the lines of my site quite well so this works perfectly for me.
Once you’ve edited it, brought it together and done all of your design elements, you
save it and then you’re ready to go into the management area.
The management area is where you start to use Eventbrite to promote your event because
it’s not just about managing the event for people coming in but there are all sorts of
promotion tools and things that’ll help you to sell or promote your event.
If you look down the left-hand side here in the Managed area, it’s going to give you
sales reports.
If I ever had any sales, they would appear here and hopefully in the very short future
they will start to appear here.
We’ve got the ability to do things like invite people in.
You can email out invitations.
We click on Email Invitations, you’ll see that there’s some integration with MailChimp
and something called Event Kingdom where you can invite people to.
You can also just choose to email an invitation to people on your own mail list.
If you have a mail list in Gmail or some other place, you can import the addresses and use
this as a mail management system.
You can customize how the email is going to look going out but this is all fully interactive
when it arrives in someone’s inbox.
So they can order tickets for the event directly from here.
You can also set up the follow-up emails and the reminder emails, etc. within here.
As we go through some of the other options that we have here, you can set and establish
your discount codes here.
You can publish it to social media including to Facebook.
The widgets are very, very important because the widgets allow me to create website integration
for my own site.
So I can put a ticket form on my site or a button or I can even put a countdown calendar
on my site of when the event is coming up.
This automatically—if I just click here, I’ll show you what happens—it’ll go
through and it will create the code that I need and I can determine here what elements
I want to have in the widget, in other words what’s going to appear in my website, and
then this code below is what I copy and paste into my website in order to have this ad,
with 53 days and counting, running in my website.
As you see, a very full ecosystem of different things that you can do once you’ve created
your event to allow you to promote the event, ultimately manage the event and ultimately
make your event successful.
They also have tracking links and affiliate programs which allow you to have your friends,
business partners or business relationships share your event and even be paid for promoting
your event through the affiliate links.
Then also, some different analytics as you’re getting closer to your events so you can track
what’s working and what’s not working for you.
I can spend probably two or three days looking at all of the different specifics of Eventbrite
but I think suffice it to say that it is just an awesome event management tool that crosses
and kind of blends into being both a social media application and an event management
application.
It integrates with all of your devices.
The codes that it creates works just as well on people’s smartphones and iPads is it
does on their computer.
The registration forms can live on your website.
It can live on email.
They can live on Eventbrite.
You can share the pages on Eventbrite.
It is totally flexible.
I encourage you if you’re planning any sort of event to have a look at Eventbrite.
It just might change how you do your events for all time to come.
Well, I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!