Steve Dotto here.
Today, I want to show you a tool which I am, to be honest, somewhat smitten by.
It’s called Eventbrite.
Now Eventbrite is an event management tool.
Anybody who’s been charged with managing a conference or a workshop or an event knows
what a colossal amount of work managing those events are.
There’s all of the planning, there's all of the organization, and then there’s all
of the work around registering people, marketing it, making sure people have tickets and if
you charge for it, collecting the money, and following up with the attendees afterwards
with questionnaires on the workshop.
It’s just a colossal amount of work.
In the past, it would probably take several people to organize even a small event.
Eventbrite is a tool which facilitates all of those different disparate parts, other
the facilities management.
It manages all of your attendees, all of your registration, all of your communication, and
all of your accounting.
It does all of that in one place.
I've been using it for several months now doing my own workshops.
I’m doing a series of productivity workshops and I’ve put them on myself, and I could
never do this along without a tool like Eventbrite.
I could never have managed an event of this size without a tool like Eventbrite, at least
not by myself.
So it’s a tool that’s completely changed how I do my business and it’s opened a whole
bunch of new doors for me.
Now when I started thinking about doing a demonstration of the software, I realized
that it’s far too large a product for me to demo in one simple demo.
So I’m going to give you an overview in this video.
If you want to look at the tools, if you want to get right into Eventbrite and kind of learn
how we managed tickets and learn all of the different things that it does from a management
console perspective, you’re going to want to watch the other videos in this series.
There’ll be links to them at the end of this video and certainly in the YouTube area
or in my blog post.
You’ll be able to find links to the other videos here.
But let me get into showing you now what Eventbrite is and how it works.
As I said, it’s an event management software.
If you’re comfortable with WordPress, Drupal, or any other HTML creation tool like that,
it works very similarly.
I’m just going to quickly go into Eventbrite.
I’ve got my events here and I’ve got this sample event, which I’m going to be working
from to just show you how it works.
This is the management console for Eventbrite where you actually go into and look at your
event.
You go in and you can edit and create basically a web landing page, which is an online order
form.
Let me walk through the things that Eventbrite does as a part and parcel of that order form.
The first thing it does is it creates an area for us to actually order tickets and for people
to either purchase them or not purchase them if it’s a free event, but be able to get
tickets.
You can register and you can keep count of people when they register for it, whether
they purchased the ticket or it’s a free ticket, they get an email back which has a
barcode, which you can scan in as a point of admission or they can print off as a physical
ticket.
If it’s a paid-for event, if it’s something that they’re charging for, Eventbrite will
clear all of the credit card charges or the Paypal charges for you and keep an accounting.
They also collect taxes for you.
They do all of that and keep it in an account and then pay you out at the very end.
They do a direct deposit into your bank account at the very end.
As far as fees go or how much they charge, they’ve got a web page that tells us the
fees.
They charge us $0.99 a ticket plus 2.5% of the fee on the ticket for every ticket we
sell.
Then they also charge 3.5% credit processing fee and a similar amount if you decide to
have Paypal.
Currently within Eventbrite, you’d have to choose whether to take regular credit cards
or Paypal.
You can’t actually set up your tickets for both because of some strangeness that’s
going on with their accounting system.
I choose to make it just credit card because more people, I think, are comfortable pulling
out their credit card than using Paypal.
Some people don’t have a Paypal account so that ends up being a stop point so I choose
to just set it up with regular credit cards.
You don’t have to swallow that fee.
You can pass those fees on to the people who register for the event.
If you look down here in my Create Ticket area down here, you can see I have the ability
to pass the fee onto the buyer, absorb the fees, or create a mix where I say you pay
for the credit card processing but I’ll swallow the Eventbrite fee.
So you can set up any of those sorts of criteria based on the different tickets you sell.
If the event is free, then Eventbrite is free.
They charge nothing.
So for charity events or any free events, you’re not charged at all.
One of the benefits of collecting all of this information is once you’ve done that all,
they create a list of all of your attendees.
They’ve collected email addresses and mailing addresses so you can follow up with people
with a mass email.
They actually have tools within Eventbrite to email out to all of your attendees.
You can send a day before reminding them about parking situations or reminding them of the
time, that sort of information.
I believe I mentioned that with their ticket, they get a barcode that you can scan in.
That works on all new smartphones.
On your side, you install a simple little app on your smartphone or your iPhone or your
android phone, and when these people come it uses the camera to scan the barcode on
the printed ticket or on their screen to register people so you actually know who’s showing
up for an event and who hasn’t shown up for an event.
They create all of these different management tools around it, which are just wonderful.
They also create social media tools.
Once you’ve created your event—and here you can see the design page where they automatically
create a map for you.
I’ll walk through all this stuff in the other videos—once you’ve done that, they
go through it and they can create social media tools.
I use it for a little theatre company.
I do a little bit of work for the Metro Theatre here in Vancouver.
We needed an online ticketing system and we didn’t want to pay huge dollars for a dedicated
online ticketing system that actually mapped out each and every seat.
So we decided to try out Eventbrite for us and it has worked out exceptionally well.
Here is what Eventbrite does for us.
This is Metro’s website.
After I’ve created the event within Eventbrite where people could go and purchase tickets,
it then creates a widget, which is this calendar here where we can see the upcoming play of
the Winslow Boy.
We could see all of the dates that it’s playing.
This calendar was created within Eventbrite and all I had to do was copy and paste the
code into—in this case I’m using WordPress—and it puts this beautiful calendar in place.
If people want to purchase tickets for any of these events, they just click on the day
they want to go and then it brings us into the Eventbrite interface where they could
order their tickets.
They could choose the date that they want to attend the show.
They can choose how many tickets they want to purchase.
They can go through and they can do social media sharing.
There’s the description of the event, which is what I’ve put in and added into the HTML
window there, and then when they go to order, they’re brought into a credit card clearing
house.
It’s all secure.
Once their order is placed, I get an email or the theatre gets an email telling us who’s
purchased the tickets, what their name is, and any notes that they’ve sent us.
The people who purchased the tickets received an email as well, which has their ticket,
which has their bar code, and also all of their instructions.
It is a terrific tool and you can see there are additional features like the ability to
send an email directly to us, that sort of stuff.
They’ve built all of those facilities into it.
Once the event is over, Eventbrite gives you a day or so to clear up any reversed charges,
if you have to do it, or anything you have to clean up.
If you ever have to reverse a charge, it’s actually quite easy to do.
Then they do a direct deposit into your bank account of the amount minus their fees.
It’s simple, it’s elegant and it works terrifically.
Eventbrite, as far as I’m concerned, is a revolutionary tool as far as event management.
I wouldn’t even think about putting on an event without using a tool like Eventbrite.
I know there are a few others on the market.
I’m not sure if they’re as elegantly implemented as Eventbrite but as you can tell by my glowing
summary at this point here, it is a product that I am quite taken with.
If you want to know more about Eventbrite, check out the other videos that I am posting.
If you’re looking at this, immediately after I post this first one it may take a day or
two to all get up but I’m going to go through a little bit of a series, maybe two or three
videos.
I’m not sure exactly how many there will be but they’re going to walk through some
of the different processes and some of the different tools within Eventbrite to give
you kind of a peek under the hood.
It is a tool that's well worth exploring.
I hope you found this video useful.
If you have, please give us a like.
Social media is important to us all and getting a little bit of a prop is always useful to
us as far as raising our profile within the internet community.
Of course, you can subscribe to our videos here on YouTube as well.
I hope that you’ve found this valuable.
I’m Steve Dotto.
I’ll talk to you soon.
[END OF VIDEO] Steve Dotto0Eventbrite Management Essentials
b0March 26, 2013
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