My colleague, Tom Garigen, touched on the benefits of using third party tools like Eventbrite in a recent blog post. I thought he made some excellent points and I wanted to expand on them with some of my own thoughts and experiences.
Over the years, I’ve worked with a variety of clients and I’ve found that many of them hold public events of some kind, whether they are frequent or occasional, regular or sporadic, online or in-person. Recently, I began recommending Eventbrite as a platform to facilitate this common need for several reasons:
- It’s dead simple. The biggest selling point for me for any web application is always ease of use.
- It has all the options you really need, regardless of the size of your event.
- It’s free for free events and pretty reasonable for paid events. See pricing for more details.
Creating an Event
You can set up an event by simply adding a title, date, time, and ticket information. That means that you can literally create events in minutes. Plus, there are many additional options available that may be handy:
- Eventbrite will automatically insert a Google Map of your location (you have the option of turning this feature off).
- You can set up recurring events.
- You can create tickets at multiple price levels. You can also offer free or pay-your-own-price tickets.
- You can schedule when tickets are available, which allows you to adjust pricing as the event approaches.
- You can make events private so that can be shared via social media outlets or so that they are invite-only. Either type can be password-protected.
- Once the event has been created, you can adjust how the event page looks by choosing from provided templates or by creating your own theme.
Managing Your Event
Once your event has been scheduled, you’ll be able to see details about your sales, tickets sold, invitations, and attendees. In addition, Eventbrite provides a number of tools to help you promote and enhance your event:
- Eventbrite has a built-in tool that allows you create and send email invitations.
- You can create discounts by amount or percentage that can be applied to any or all tickets for a scheduled period of time.
- You can connect your Eventbrite account with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to reach your audience through social media.
- There are a number of options for web site integration, although I’ve been a little disappointed with the event calendar. The calendar is quite small and, currently, a larger version isn’t available.
- There are a number of built-in tools to help analyze your success, as well as the option to integrate with Google Analytics.
Eventbrite provides you with the tools to effectively run an event without melting your brain. If you’re involved with event planning in any way, I recommend checking it out.
