Free Church Events Registration
As part of our move towards becoming a Web 2.0 church we have found that utilising the web to interface with our local community has brought new efficiencies. We run a number of community events which invariably need registration. We utilise a free online registration service at www.eventbrite.com
You can use www.eventbrite to enable prepayment for events, and a percentage is taken off each booking. You can utilise the service for free simply for registrations alone. You create a profile ins econds, and then create events. Through the management interface you can keep track of how many people have booked and you can also generate spreadsheets capturing necessary data like names, addresses, etc.
I have used it successfully to open up registration for limited place events, and also for events where you simply need to know numbers. Our children’s holiday clubs are especially in demand months in advance and to cut out the chaos we have turned to www.eventbrite.com to manage the limited places.
You can generate buttons for your website which allows people to register in a few easy clicks, and the free online service does your paperwork for you.
The people at Crunchbase.com like it too and use it themselves. They’ve written a good description:
An Eventbrite event can be setup in minutes. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you start an event and add the name, date, time, location and other essential information.
Some optional features include repeating events, limiting the number of tickets, publishing the event in the Eventbrite directory, classifying and tagging your event, using password protection to access your event page and creating a personalized URL.
Next, you need to create your ticket types. This requires you to enter such information as name, price, quantity available and the end sales date & time. There are also optional features like adding a description, creating a donation ticket type, indicating a minimum or maximum quantity per order and adding a future date for the tickets to go on sale. Following this page is where you select and setup payment methods. Methods available include PayPal, Google Checkout and offline payment.
Before publication Eventbrite allows you to customize your page by choosing the colours and adding your logo.
Eventbrite also offers countless other ways to make event planner’s lives easier. It can help you with promoting, creating a survey, sending e-mail invitations, creating contact lists, website integration, offering discount codes, creating an attendee report and more. With all Eventbrite can do, 2.5% seems like a small price to pay.
