How To Use Eventbrite To Manage Your Event – A Full Guide – Blog | Freeparking NZ

Eventbrite is the world’s largest event and ticket management system. It offers excellent functionality and a host of benefits that will make your event a success. This makes it the perfect platform to promote your event on and this end-to-end guide will make your experience with Eventbrite even easier.

Hosting an event is always a big challenge. Many things to think of, many things to do and many people involved. Eventbrite helps making a big part of every event a lot easier. This platform lets you create an event and manages all the RSVP and promotion topics-giving you time to focus on other important tasks that need to be done.

Preparing

1. Choose a plan

Eventbrite offers three different plans: essentials, Professional and PREMIUM. They all provide the same basic tools such as creating an event, support through the Online Help Centre, ticketing and registration essentials. The main differences are that Professional offers certain services like the number of ticket types, customizable checkout forms and detailed sales analytics. PREMIUM offers  more features including on-site staffing and support, permissions, 24/7 phone support and team access. This plan is especially convenient if you are planning a huge event and have a lot of people working on it and a short time to organize it.

2. Sign up for free

After deciding on the plan, the next thing you’ll do, is sign up for free. Eventbrite doesn’t charge you for creating and promoting your event. Eventbrite only charges you if you want to sell tickets. They charge between $0.49 +1.5-4% per ticket. The PREMIUM plan has custom pricing, so you should find out the prices before signing up for this option.

Creating your event

3. Be clear about the main setup

Once you’ve signed up think about the following things:

• What will the name of your event be?
• When is your event going to take place?
• Where will you host your event?
• Do you have a picture for your event site?

4. Build up your event page

As soon as you know the main information for your event, you can start designing your event page. To do that you need go to your profile and click ‘Create Event’. Your Editor Manager will open and you can enter all of the required information for your event.

5. Create tickets

Once you’ve created your event page, think about your tickets.

• Are they going to be for free or do your attendees need to pay?
• If that’s the case how much will the tickets cost?
• What is the maximum of attendees you can/want to host?
• Think of an appropriate ticket name
• Do you want a specific ticket sale time frame?
• Do you want to add group orders?

6. Additional settings

Do you want your event to be public or private? Eventbrite offers the possibility of creating a public page which allows you to spread further, reaching a bigger audience and generating more ticket sales. For this option you just must enter the type of event as well as the topic. This will give you higher chances of your event being shared and discovered by many more people.

If you would prefer having a private page it will only be accessible by people you specify. This is a good option if you only want certain customers or clients of yours to come, for example as a business event for a certain clientele. When choosing a private page, you have three options to pick from. This is where you specify who can see your page and order tickets.

7. Preview

Click ‘Design’ to get a preview of your event page. This allows you to check if the page looks great and get an overall view if you like what your (potential) attendees will be seeing.

Manage editor

The Manage tool on Eventbrite contains almost all the important features you chose the platform for. This is the place to edit invitations, emails, promote your event, see the analytics, manage the attendees and much more. It’s important to note that most of the tools in here are only useful after publishing your event. Follow the next steps to understand what you need to do prior to releasing it for everyone to see.

8. Event dashboard

The event dashboard is more of a shortcut which will be interesting as soon as your ticket sales have started. The important thing to know about the dashboard is at the very bottom of the page, you will find your event URL. You can customize the URL, but the term ‘Eventbrite’ is fixed.

Order Options

9. Order form

This is where you manage your registration page. You first need to choose the collection type. Decide here who you want information from and what kind of information.

Now is the time to activate group registration if you want to and start designing your registration page.

The first thing to do is choose a title for your page as well as a short instruction for your attendees. If you would like to have a limit for the registration time you can enter it here, as well as the message to display after the ticket sales end.

At the bottom of the page you have the ability to:

• Choose whether your attendees should be allowed to pick up their tickets at the event or only access online
• Edit information about answers to questions you asked after their registration
• Choose if you accept refund requests.

10. Order confirmation

The next step is designing the order confirmation. Write a message for the order confirmation page and for the confirmation email. For the email you need to add a default ‘reply-to’ email address as well as choosing whether you want the same settings for all ticket types or not. The last thing to do in here is to tick (or not tick) the box which asks if you want to include printable tickets in all orders.

11. Event type and language

Choose your language and whether you want it to be a ticketed or registration event.

12. Waitlist

Enable or disable the waitlist feature. If you choose to enable a window will open with more required information like an auto-response message and waitlist ticket release message.

Invite and promote

Here you will realise it is not possible to click ‘email invitations’ and ‘website integrations’. These features will be enabled as soon as you publish your event.

13. Add to Facebook

The task of this tool is to connect your Eventbrite page to Facebook, creating an automatic Facebook event. Connect your business page and not your personal one unless this is your intention.

14. Discount and access codes

There are three different options for codes if you want to offer them. You can select out of the following: coded discounts, public discounts or access codes.

For the first two you need to enter a name and decide whether you want it to be a dollar amount or a percentage off the actual ticket price. You also need to choose how many discount codes you would like to have, if they should apply on every ticket or just to some of them and the time frame they are supposed to be valid in. Note that for public discounts, everyone who visits your landing page will be able to see the code. The coded discount is a great opportunity to boost your sales from third parties.

Access codes are a little bit different. You use that code to reveal hidden tickets. You will see a link after creating the code and this gives attendees the possibility to see the hidden tickets without entering the code.

15. Tracking links

This allows you to see which promotions bring in sales and which don’t. To access that information, you just need to enter a name and use the link that is generated.

16. Affiliate programmes

Use these to compensate promoters for the ticket sales they drive. On this page you can look at the sales generated by each promoter and you can pay them out from here too.

Analyse

Once your sales have started, this is the place where you see who is entering your event and see the exact ticket purchases.

17. Event reports

Event reports are very helpful if you host a smaller event with catering. This tool makes it possible to ask the attendees some customisable questions in the process of their ticket purchase such as dietary wishes.

Once published, you can also see an attendee summary with all the information about your attendees.

Extensions

This tool presents different programs that help you promote your event. It allows you to install apps, promote via other channels other than your own social media channels and Eventbrite.

After deciding whether you need any of those extensions, you are good to go and can hit that publish button.

Published and looking good? Great! But the work isn’t done…

Invite and promote

18. Email invitations

This is the most important tool. This is where you design when, how and with what you want to invite your attendees.

The first thing you need to do is choose the invitation template. Enter the name of the sender and a subject line. You can also edit the message you would like to have on the invitations. If you click ‘customise’ afterwards, you can decide what you want to be shown on your invitation. You can request an RSVP, add a Facebook link, supply a location map and more. You can also change the text, background and link colours on the page, to make it look more consistent with your own website for example.

Choose your guests and set the date and time for the invitation to be sent. You can add and edit as many invitations as you want.

19. Website integrations

This is a new feature on Eventbrite which allows you to connect your website to your event on Eventbrite. It gives you the freedom to sell tickets on your own homepage without having the attendees going to Eventbrite and leaving your website.

To start the process of adding the widget to your website, click on ‘Show me’ and there are two options to choose from. Do you want a button on your website which opens the checkout modal over your content or do you want the URL embedded on the page with your content? After choosing, make sure that your website is enabled for HTTPS/TLS, otherwise it won’t work. Click on ‘Embed Code’ and copy this link. Depending on what web platform you use, you will need to paste the link to your homepage and that will lead visitors of your homepage to the event and ticket sale.

Manage attendees

20. Orders/add attendees

This tool is perfect if you want to search for an order. You just enter some of the required information and then the computer will tell you everything about it.

You can also manually add attendees to your event. This means you can send them a ticket without them needing to visit either your website or Eventbrite.

21. Email attendees

With this tool, you can create attendee reminders or customer specific emails with special information- for example, for VIPs.

22. Attendee list

This prints out a list of all attendees sorted however you want it. It is provided as a PDF document for you to print.

23. Name badges

This is a great feature for you if you want name badges for all your attendees. You can select the attendees, choose a style and customise how you want them sorted using your attendee information. After previewing these, you click ‘Generate Badges’ which creates a PDF document you can easily print out.

24. Check-in

If you don’t want to have the guest list printed out but instead check-in the attendees from your computer, this tool is what you use. You simply search for each customer and enter the number of people that arrived under the name of each attendee.

Congratulations – you’ve created an event and Eventbrites’ work is done.