Tech Tip Tuesday = Easy Events
My Tech Tip for this Tuesday is This – Make it EASY for People to Connect, Follow, and Show up at Events.
If you are hosting an event (and you actually want people to show up) create the registration in a way that makes it very easy for them (the average techno-challenged human) to register, RSVP, invite friends to join in, and help you promote it. A good rule of thumb is to have one main registration place i.e. Eventbrite. You can also post it to a MeetUp group if you own one, but there are so many good reasons to use Eventbrite instead.
- Events on Eventbrite integrate well with lots of other social platforms and make sharing easy. See screen shot below where I linked to LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, etc. (I created an event on EB and it pulled in all relevant data so I didn’t have to recreate it in FB events; Nifty!)
- You can download a calendar file and easily add it to your Outlook, Google calendar, Yahoo, or ical
- Designs can be created to match your logo, themes, etc.
- You can choose to include a map so people can actually find you.
- You can have multiple event ticket types, price differences, cut-off dates for early registration offerings, special promo codes.
- You can choose what information is made public. Maybe you don’t want people to know how many people have signed up so far. Just turn off that feature and the attendee information is private.
- Eventbrite will ask attendees to complete their name and email address to create their profile. This information is saved and can be easily downloaded for future use. (i.e. Follow-up email to ask them to be added to your email newsletter.)
- Most of the basic features you will need are intuitive. If you are a first time organizer, ask someone for help or take a practice run on a small event to get the hang of the more advanced features.
- Eventbrite is free to post free events. If you do charge for the tickets, they add small fee you can pass on or absorb.
There are so many good reasons to use Eventbrite for your local events. My two favorite are the ability to Share the Event on numerous platforms and the fact that I’m building my Email List of Connections with each event. I pay money to promote and organize MeetUps, but even then I don’t get access to any member’s email address unless they give it to me and interact with me directly.
The key is to make your event easy to find on numerous platforms. You need to decide where you will direct the attendees to register, but all paths should lead to one main place to register. Pick one. Make it clear what you want attendees to do. Make sure it is not overly cumbersome to register or you will lose people before they decide whether or not they would like to attend. Make sure you are able to store attendee data (especially email address and name), so you can communicate later.
I post and share events on Facebook, but so does everybody…and when was the last time that was really effective to get people to look at the post or show up? I get hundreds of invitations each week and don’t even look at half of them. Make sure you tweet out the link to registration for those rare breeds that live and die for Twitter.
There are plenty of other platforms you can use for events. Most are very costly and not very intuitive to use. If you have had an experience with an event management tool and would like to share, please comment and let us know what you liked or didn’t like about it.
If you have a technology tip to share or would like to suggest a topic for a future discussion, please email it to Organic Growth Coach, Karin Conway KarinMConway@gmail.com
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