It is one of the most adopted and therefore definitely worth a review and interview with its Director of Marketing, Jack Mardack.

How does it work?

Few things that I love about the service:

- There is no standard price. They earn a percentage based on your ticket price.
- It’s customizable. You can pretty much input as many details as you prefer. The event page is greatly adaptable and here are few examples.

Alumni Meeting

Fundraising Event

Social Meeting

- Online secure payment. If you don’t work regularly with events this might be a bit of an hassle to set up. Great tool.
- Affiliate Program. A brand new program where you can promote events and earn up to 35% commission (If you blog about events and have ads you might want to consider this instead of random text ads)
- Tagging, personalized URL, RSS. Welcome to Web 2.0, finally some fresh air.
- Promotion. Eventbrite immediately indexes the event with major search engines. This usually takes forever if you don’t have an updated platform up and running.
- Survey, etc. There are few more you can check them out here

I decided to ask a few questions to Jack Mardack, who was very kind and answered as follows:

What is the idea behind Eventbrite?

Eventbrite is a self-service event registration and online ticketing platform. The idea behind Eventbrite is to empower individuals, companies and organizations of all sizes with the tools they need to successfully promote and sell-out their events on the Web.

What’s in it for event managers?

If you are someone who is already tasked with managing events and selling tickets, Eventbrite can make your life a lot easier and make you more successful. We give the event manager control over the entire process, from pre-event marketing, to registration, to ticket sales, and even give them powerful customer relationship management tools they can use to market future events or promote other products and services.

What’s in it for Average Joe?

What’s in it for the Average Joe is the ability to go from being an Average Joe to being a successful event manager in about 5 minutes. See previous answer. We’ve worked hard to make our tools as easy to use as they are powerful. The result is that everyday people, from all walks of life, are using Eventbrite to promote and sell-out events of every conceivable type and size.

What’s in Eventbrite’s future?

We’re committed to continuing to enrich our features and to making Eventbrite even more powerful. The future is we will remain focused on providing event managers with everything they need to succeed, and on making it as easy as possible for anyone to make their event a success. What we see for the industry is that many more individuals and organizations are going to become event organizers. This is going to produce an incredible number and diversity of events, many of which are going to try to find their audiences on the Web. It’s going to be a really long tail, and Eventbrite will be there for all of them.

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A structured budget helps in monitoring costs, understanding what you can afford, reporting to management and most of all keeping things under control. In this post a bit on budgeting and cutting costs.

Budget Items

The first step in coming up with a comprehensive eg. conference budget is to separate expenditures and income.

For an average conference EXPENDITURES will be:

- Venue
- Advertising and Promotion
- Speakers/Performers token
- Speakers/Performers accommodation
- Catering
- Equipment
- Team/Staff
- Admin
- Badges

INCOME might be:

- Regos/Tickets
- Sponsors
- Public Funds (Should they be available)

Just having these things written down makes me feel better…In fact now I can control, monitor and allocate financial weight to each item. How nice is that! See here for templates and more items.

Cutting Costs

Second step is cutting costs. Why? I see the event manager mission as spending the least amount of money while making everyone participating or having interest in the event happy.

Let’s see some tricks and please, you event planners out there, comment on this post and share yours!

- One vs. Multiple events. I will always prefer to go larger. One main event helps you in leveraging your financial/promotional/logistic efforts in one direction.

One criticism might be that to put all eggs in one basket increases risk.

Nevertheless, if we look at events as complex structures of small activities, increasing the number of activities might increase total risk, while shrinking the structure might work well.

If we e.g. have three 100-people events with three different promotional campaigns, we will have to probably manage 3 separate ad agencies. One main event would put the things together and minimize risk while cutting costs.

Of course it is necessary to have a content that could be homogeneously wrapped together in one day.

- One vs Multiple Suppliers. As for the above working with a trustable supplier gives you more bargaining power. But then again risk increases. In this instance is always useful to have a plan B with some lastminute AV solutions or catering contingency plan.

- Publishing. Do your own publishing. There are several free tools to come up with sound promotional material. Leverage on that as much as you can, as outsourcing in this case could be very expensive.

Use my blog and other online resources to find templates, tutorials and tools on how to design badges, brochures, flyers etc.

The fact that I did the badges myself for the last event I organized, also gave me a lot of flexibility to modify names from registration forms or add new people that showed up at the conference without registering.

- Video Conferencing. For meetings and conference planners, use online tools as much as you can. I will soon be posting on free tools that help you having online video conferencing and powerpoint or desktop sharing.

It is a good practice because it helps in cutting the major expenditure in conferences, travel and accommodation for speakers.

Try to limit the speakers mix to the canonical 80/20. Where 20% is non local speakers which might have a promotional benefit for the event and thus repay the investment. Look for speakers in your area so you do not have to pay for accommodation.

- Come up with a sound sponsorship strategy. Selling tickets or registrations could test your heart seriously. If everything is in place you should be able to sell out all the tickets you have plannned to give away.

From my experience that does not happen all the time.

Sponsors help in reducing the leverage on ticket as the main source of income thus diversifying risk. If you have visibility, sell it to 2 or 3 sponsors that might be interested in your target.

Come up with advertising solutions tailored to your prospect, design target profiles and give them numbers. 2 or 3 sponsor might help financially as much as 200 registrations so you might want to consider to invest in this sense.

- Look out for public funds. Depending on the event content there might be a community interested in sponsoring an event with public funds available. Leverage on that.

- Look for discounts and negotiate. Having the venue to manage most of the activities increases the price and thus your bargaining power toward a better rate. Bulk up and ask for a good price and let them know you are considering different options…I am sure you’ll end up surprised of people reactions.

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In order to do that it is necessary to breakdown the event in packages of activities. Sometimes identifying such activities could be an hassle.

I’ve aways used packages maps that suggests items which I might not consider when brainstorming. Such maps become even more important when budgeting.

Here is a map with event items which pretty much belong to most of the events either small or large.

Enjoy

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The most sophisticated softwares include a budget section to manage expenses and income.

For those not using any software and that rely on Office to manage budget, Excel is the most adopted option.

Microsoft Office Online offers a cool template that I used for one of the events I organized. You can find it here.

More Tools to come!

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