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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What is Openproj?

As for its website

“OpenProj is a free, open-source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. OpenProj has been downloaded over 150,000 times in the first weeks since it was released and has quickly become one of the most popular open-source applications.”

Now, you can believe me when I tell you I am a busy person and I got no time to waste. I can tell you this software is extremely easy to learn, even if you have no previous experience with project management software. It is a clone of Microsoft Project and it is very intuitive.

Hopefully I convinced you by now. So what you need to do is downloading your free copy of Openproj here. If you’re on Windows download the .zip file, for you Linux mates out there I don’t think you need explanations, just select your platform.

Now you need to download the event template I’ve prepared for you to enjoy. You can find it here.

Now let’s have a look at what you’ll find in the file.

In the starting screen you can edit this column according to your needs. I must say this list is very comprehensive. It has been conceived with two purposes:

- Giving you budget Items to think about

- Clearing the path to create a comprehensive WBS

On the right hand side you can see the Gantt outline which has a preset time interval of 1 day between every item. You can modify that according to your needs and estimates. Very easy to use…

By clicking on the fourth little box on the right you can decide everything about people working in the project. You got cost per hour, emails and you can divide them in groups of competency.

You can also add machinery cost, even though we don’t really need this feature for events.

This section will allow you to easily allocate resources to tasks and then it will automatically compute costs which will appear in your budget…awesome. Change this section according to your needs.

You also got on the sixth little box an automatic WBS… again super easy.

I’ll let you explore the rest of it.

If you have any question either comment on this post or mail me (address on the right column)

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Sourceforge has approved the project and we know have a space, a forum and several other tools to start working.

I invite you to have your say at the official My Event page

I already got positive feedback and I feel very motivated to work on the project.

I also invite you to express your opinion on what features you think the software should have. What platform would you prefer? And everything you feel might help in your event planning business.

You could either reply to this post, register on sourceforge, write me an email or whatever is more convenient.

I feel that we need your help in this to give it a go so we can enjoy the results ASAP!

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I must say I am a bit embarrassed with the subject because there is no complete solution for planning. There are a lot of good project management, paper submission, accounting, CRM, office suites softwares.

But not event management.

Event planning is a little of all the above. Therefore I am convinced that the discipline we love deserves a damn well software, comprehensive and free!

It is a paradox to me that the field where humans get pretty close to computers has no software to help.

Oh wait there are several softwares out there but you have to pay good dollars to get them.

Reality is that not all the event planners work in great companies with big monies. There are event planners like me that started their own business with limited resources. I have always stressed that a spreadsheet can help you in thousands of ways.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t be happy with a comprehensive event planning software, free and collaborative.

That’s why I submitted today to Sourceforge.org, My Event. This project aims to develop an open-source free GNU based event planning software. This is a call for everyone out there who wants to collaborate with competences in events, software development, cheering and support

I will keep you guys posted on approval of the project, in the meanwhile if you are interested send me an email, or if you have a “computer friend” you might want to talk to him and involve him in the project.

I think everyone will benefit from this and that we will have a lot of fun doing it!

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I previously posted on how to make a Gantt chart, nonetheless I found also few videos on Youtube on how to create one in the easy to use Excel (pretty similar for those using Calc):


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If you use the Gantt chart macro of Excel you should take a look at this:

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If you are using Excel 2007 this is for you:

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I also bumped into a couple of tutorials for dotProject which I think is a great, easy to use open-source software and most of all is free:

#1

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#2

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I must say there isn’t much out there in terms of video tutorials. Should you guys find anything worth publishing, please comment on this post.

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The OS methodology has been applied over the years in different contexts, software being the most successful. But those more up to date would definitely know about the openCola, beer, etc.

I’ve talked before on OS concepts applied to Marketing. In fact the Web embraces the concept with some good definition and websites .

As I am an MBA in Marketing OS-Marketing has been one of my primary concerns these days. But since Event Management is my passion I am striving to think about chances to apply the OS concepts to our beloved discipline.

So I did a bit of a brainstorming session and I thought:

- On the industry side, the objective should be to allow event managers, coordinators, and those involved in the industry in general, to come together to discuss issues, develop projects and achieve results, with no direct commercial interest.

- On the customer side, I thought that OS-Event Management supports those strategies aimed at empowering those who participate an event, enabling social networking, collective decision making of what an event should be.

I think of the Event Manager not as a sort of paternalistic figure who should push customers around a pre-designed path. Instead I have a picture of a person who facilitates networking and well being of participants, the real sources of success for events.

I’ll keep thinking about it and maybe your contribution could push the topic ahead. In the meanwhile enjoy a supercool software for conferences with papers submission. How cool is that!

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Here follows a list on how your event could be more “open” and definitely cheaper.

The Open Source Event Planner manages her/his project with WinPlanner, BaseCamp, Auto Project Planner (which automatically calculates start/end dates) or the minimalistic airToDo.

For those fond of Gantt, GanttProject is the way to go. The Open Source Event Manager reads mail on Thunderbird and surfs the Internet on Firefox.

Office is a thing of the past as OpenOffice performs at the same level with no costs.

Team management could be mastered also via Group-Office Groupware a nice Internet/Intranet tool.

The CRM Event Planner that is aware of satisfaction as the best fidelity tool, Vtiger or Compiere (with a little flavour of ERP) are the best solutions.

As always mail me should you have any question

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