Transcription
Again, welcome everyone to Eventbrite Academy. This is basic event creation. Let's get started. My name is Tom and I'm a strategic success representative here at Eventbrite. I work with creators on helping them set up their events ultimately to make the best use of our Eventbrite platform.
Today's agenda is basic event creation. We're going to cover all of the steps in creating an event on Eventbrite. And rather than talk through each item on our agenda, I'm going to go through each item in a live product demo. We have a lot of ground to cover, including a review of all the items that you'll need to complete for going live with your event, which includes your basic information details, creating tickets. We're also going to talk about your order form setup, your payments and tax for the paid events. Then finally, publishing your event. Let's do it.
So again, instead of just being a talking head going through a PowerPoint, we're going to go into a live demo. So I have a test account pulled up here on the actual Eventbrite website. Now, when you first log into Eventbrite, it may look something similar to what you see on my page here. And uh this is great if you're attending events, but we're not attending events. We are event creators. To go to the event management side of things, we'll need to hover our mouse over that top right corner where our email address is located. And then from the menu dropdown, we'll select manage my events. And if this is the first time you've done this, you may be asked a series of survey questions. Go ahead and answer those questions as best possible that will help curate what's called your homepage here. And this homepage is a wonderful list of resources for you, a newbie on Eventbrite. Everything from next steps you should take, different resources for you like our Eventbrite blog. You can visit our Eventbrite Academy to sign up for other classes. There's all sorts of helpful things here.
Now, in this session, we're going to focus on just creating an event. In our last Eventbrite Academy session, we discussed uh important things like event organization settings and account settings. I'm going to do a very very brief summary of that here. But if you are new to Eventbrite, before you even get to the event creation side of things, uh you'll notice a building icon on the lefthand side. Uh if you're new to Eventbrite, you'll need to go there to uh not only verify your account, but also add a bank account. If you are hosting paid events and if you are hosting paid events in the United States, we'll also need your taxpayer information and that can be done on that building icon on the left hand side. Another summary from last week's session, the organization settings, that gear icon on the left hand side. Um, I do recommend completing your organizer profile. This is a public profile that describes who you are as a unique organizer. And it will show all your public events on one page. The other thing I recommend doing is uh on the team management page, if you have team members that you need to have access to this back end of Eventbrite, I highly encourage you to invite them to a role. Admin has all the same access that you, the owner, has you can also create your own custom roles with limited permissions. So that's a very very brief summary of last week's session. Uh consider doing those items before we even create our first event here which is the focus of this webinar is event creation. Basic event creation.
So to create an event we'll go to the calendar icon. It's that uh events page. If you hover your mouse over the calendar icon on the left hand side, this is where we will go to not only create our events, but also manage our events in the future. To create an event, we'll click on the orange create event button. It will ask, do you want to start from scratch or would you like to create your event faster with AI? Now, you're more than welcome to create your event faster with AI. Um, especially if you have a kind of a simple event setup. In this session though, I'm going to start from scratch to kind of go over all the important details of creating an event. But, uh, you might find that AI tool handy, especially if you have a very, uh, simple event setup.
So, the first thing we need to do on our event is build our event page. And this is where we'll include all of our event details and let our attendees know what to expect. The first thing we can do is upload what's called a main event image. And if you click on that box there, it will open up the ability to upload a main event image or you can design one with our Canva integration. So what is a main event image? It's the first thing people see when it comes to your event. I always encourage main event images to show the atmosphere, vibe, and feeling of the event or perhaps the activity or the venue or maybe if it's a food event, show the food or drinks being served. What I discourage is a main event image with a lot of text, mostly because people don't read that text and there's another location that's better suited for that text. Now, a little bit of text is okay. What's more important with your main event image is showing the vibe and atmosphere. We're trying to get people to click on your event. And a image with a lot of text, that's not going to get people to click on your event. But a picture with really tasty tacos on it, that's more likely to get people to click on your event. Um, there are some requirements for the main event image. You can see those requirements here underneath where you would upload it. Um, I know it might be a little small on my screen, but basically a 2:1 ratio is going to work best for your main event image. Again, you can upload up to 10. I'm going to upload this one for my test practice event here. In addition to a main event image, you can also add a video link from YouTube or Vimeo to show your events vibe. Um, please note that this video URL for either YouTube or Vimeo must be published and public for it to work properly.
Our next step on our basic uh build your event page is to add our event title. So, you'll notice I just uh clicked on the event title here, and that opened up this little event overview box. With our event title, this is, I think, one of the most important steps of the event creation process. We need a clear descriptive title that indicates what our event is and about. And you want to put your attendee cap on. When you put your attendee cap on, they have no idea who your organization is. They have no idea what your events are, what you're about. With that attendee cap on, they've never heard of you. Based off of your event title alone, they should know what your event is and why they should come. So, I generally do uh recommend avoiding abbreviations. So instead of SEFA, you know what is SEIFA? No one knows what SEIFA is. Instead of doing that, it would be South Eastern Farmers Association Conference 2024. That's a much more clear descriptive title of what my event is. Or perhaps um you know instead of Ignition 2024, you know what is ignition? It sounds cool. It sounds flashy. But if we do Ignition 2024, um you know, dance introduction to dance class. Uh that's that's a much more clear, concise title that tells us what this event is and about. For my title here, I'm going to go with uh Don't Stop Believing Tribute to Journey Concert. Again, a clear title that tells people what my event is about. In addition to a title, we need to have a short 140 character uh description summary about whatever our event is about. Now, we can use our suggest summary with AI that will use the events title to suggest a summary. I think it's a wonderful way to get started, but it's not perfect. The computer is not perfect. you need to double check its work. Um, I think uh this one was plenty plenty plenty good plenty well not using proper grammar here. Get ready to rock out to all the classic hits of Journey. I love it. But your summary should be 140 characters. The most important details, the eye-catching information about your event. Moving on.
Now, we need to set the events date and time and location. So, I'm going to click on this plus sign here at the top right corner to enter this information. Now, the first thing we need to do is choose is this going to be a single event or a recurring event. Single events can be, you know, it's basically a one and done. Now, a single event can take place over multiple days. You know, you can have like a three-day conference from April 20th all the way to April 22nd. You know, maybe it's a a three-day conference. So, a single event can take place over multiple days. More of think of a single event is that once that event is done, it is over with. A recurring event is when you have a the same event and most things about the event are exactly the same. It just reoccurs again and again and again. A good example of this might be a farmers market that reoccurs every Saturday or perhaps um an introduction yoga class that occurs every Wednesday. So if you have the pretty much the same event and that same event reoccurs again and again and again recurring event may be the best setup for you. Single event again a single event can last multiple days but basically once that event is done it's over with. Um for our tribute to Journey concert we're going to make this a single one day event. Let's make that uh Friday. We'll make that April 20th. And then you could choose again your very start time and end time. So let's make this uh concert start at 7. We'll have it end at 11. Okay.
The next thing we'll need to do is to set up the location of our event. We'll do venue if our location will be in person, online event if our uh event is going to take place virtually online, and then we would select to be announced if we're not certain of our location yet. Now, with online events, there is an extra step in the event creation process. We're not going to cover that here today, but I'll show you where to access our help center. There's a wonderful article on creating um online events. Basically, there's going to be an extra step in the event creation process. If you do an online event, you need to set up what's called the online event page, uh which is where you'll include the links for how people will access your online event. uh we're not going to cover that here, but I do encourage you to uh look up the article on creating online events if that is what you are doing for your first event here on Eventbrite venue. That's what you would select if your location is in person. Then we would simply search the location powered by Google and this is where you want people to show up for your event. And I'm going to do the Waffle House closest to my my house here. Boom. Now, you want your location though to be the actual location you'll have people show up for your event. Now, you'll notice though once you put your location in, you'll see the option for reserved seating. I only recommend setting up your event as reserved seating if it's very important for attendees to have specifically assigned seats or tables. If it's not important for your attendees to have specifically assigned seats or tables, I don't recommend using this reserved seating option. If you are doing reserved seating though, you'll need to toggle that reserved seating on and then you'll have an additional step of creating the venue map and assigning those seats within that venue map to specific tiers. We're not going to go over reserved seating setup in this uh basic event creation webinar. Very similar to the online events, um uh we have a dedicated help center article for creating reserved seating events. And if it is important for your attendees to have specifically assigned seats and or tables and you do need to make a reserved seating event, uh I highly encourage you to visit our help center. We have a lovely article on reserved seating creation. Our event though is going to be non-reserved seating. Let's move forward.
Next, in the about this event section, we'll click on the plus sign to expand this. This is where we'll add more details about our event and include what people can expect if they attend. This is where we'll put important information like uh you know uh parking instructions, accommodations, age restrictions, any important pieces of information about this event should go here to help get started. Similar to the summary, we can have the AI integration suggest a description that will use our events title, location, and date. It's a great way to get started, but if you need additional information, um it I definitely recommend taking a look at it. It's not perfect, but also include important things, you know, important instructions related to your event. Is there a dress code? Are there important items to bring etc. You can also add additional images and videos and text. Further down, we do have also dedicated sections for agendas and frequently asked questions. For agenda, let's say you have a three-day conference. That might be helpful to fill out an agenda for when your speakers or performers will be coming on stage. frequently asked questions. That's also a very helpful section for you to complete for your event. The more information you have uh listed out here, the less questions you'll get from attendees. Once you're happy with your build your event page, we'll save and continue and move forward to our next page.
This is where we will set up our tickets. Now, first you need to indicate how many tickets do you want to sell. If you plan on selling more than 25 tickets, you will be required to sign up for one of our Eventbrite packages. Um, there's a flex plan and I believe a subscription plan. Um, but if you plan on selling more than 25 tickets for your event, you will need to sign up for uh an Eventbrite package. For our event though, we're just going to have up to 25 tickets. Mostly because this is a test event. It's not real, but I do encourage you to indicate how many tickets you actually plan on selling. Then we'll create our tickets. You'll choose paid or pay tickets, free if you don't want attendees to have to pay for these tickets, or donation, which will let the attendee pay any amount for their ticket. For our event though, we're going to do a paid event. Then we'll need to give our ticket a name like general admission. choose the quantity of tickets that you would like for that specific ticket type. Now remember, you can create more than one ticket type. Um, we'll we'll show that here in a moment, but this available quantity here, this is the available tickets for this specific ticket type that we're creating. We'll need to set a price if it's a paid ticket. I'll make this one $20. Now you'll notice here it says absorb fees. By default we pass the Eventbrite fees to the customer so that the customer is paying any Eventbrite fees. If you so choose, you can check mark this to absorb the Eventbrite fees from your net ticket sales. But note that means that any Eventbrite fees are coming out of your net sales. The customer isn't going to pay the fees technically. uh that's coming out of your net sales. So, I only recommend check marking that absorb fees if you're comfortable with the Eventbrite fees coming out of your net sales. Otherwise, we'll leave that unchecked if you want to pass the Eventbrite fees to the customer so that the customer pays those fees. Then, we need to put the dates that we want this particular ticket to be on sale. Um, if you have a plan, are there Eventbrite fees fees? Yes. Doesn't matter what. I I have a question here. If if there they have a plan, are there Eventbrite fees? There's always going to be Eventbrite fees. Even if you are in a uh a premium or it doesn't matter if you're premium flex subscription, there's always going to be some sort of Eventbrite fees. Um, if you really want to see the breakdown of the Eventbrite fees, there's the how fees work button underneath your price and that will give you the complete breakdown of what the fees are, what the customer is paying, and then most importantly what your payout is. So, to answer your question, yes, there are going to be Eventbrite fees. Okay. um sales, uh start time, end time. This is when you want this particular ticket to be on sale. Now, note that sales end date and time, that does automatically default to the very start of your event. If you plan on selling tickets as the event is going on, you'll need to adjust that end time so that you can sell the tickets as your event is occurring. And since my event's ending at 11:00 p.m., I made my sales end time 10:30 p.m. So people can still buy tickets and enjoy that last half hour of the show. Under advanced settings, this is where we would write a description. I always recommend for all of your ticket types to let attendees know what's included in their ticket. What do they get with this? Especially if you have like a VIP ticket, you know, do they get to meet the band afterwards or is there a special uh conference room that they get access to? Always write out what's included with their ticket in the description. Next, visibility. Um, you can make a ticket hidden so that way no one can see that ticket except for you unless you explicitly create a promo code. You can even hide tickets when they're not on sale. Or we can just keep it visible. If it's visible, everyone can see that ticket. Limit number of tickets per order. You can set a limit. Maybe you only want people to buy five tickets at a time. You can adjust the minimum or maximum quantity of tickets per order. Finally, we have uh sales channel everywhere if you want people to be able to buy tickets online and at the door through the Eventbrite organizer app. Online only if you only want them to be able to buy the tickets online. at the door only. That means that this ticket will only be sellable through the Eventbrite organizer app, theoretically at the door of the event. I'm going to keep mine to everywhere. Mobile ticket or will call. This will choose to send attendees a digital ticket or to have them pick up the ticket at the event. Once you're happy with your ticket settings, you'll hit save.
Now note, you can add more than one ticket. Maybe you want to make an early bird ticket that's a reduced price. Um, you just click this add more tickets button at the top right here corner. Maybe you want to make a a VIP ticket. Um, it's really easy. It's all the same steps. Uh, but you can definitely create more than one ticket here on your ad tickets page. In addition to tickets, you can create add-ons for things like merchandise, parking passes, promo codes, you can create a code that dis grants a discount or perhaps you can make a code that reveals one of those hidden tickets. Holds is where you can set aside a certain amount of tickets so they're not available to the general public. You know, that's helpful for things like staff tickets, you know, maybe band tickets, etc.
Now, I know our next step here says to publish the event. Oh, I got a question here. Will a person be able to print out a mobile ticket? Uh, yes. Uh, that's uh I'm not going to I'm about to cover that here in a moment. Um, but the short answer is under order options, order confirmation. I'm going to talk about this in depth at the bottom. It'll say printable tickets. This is where you can have the option for a printable ticket. And then yes, they will be able to print out that mobile ticket. So that's the answer to your question. I'm going to talk more about this later. Um, but more importantly before we publish our events, we need to go over these two items under order options. We need to go over order form and order confirmation.
First, I'm going to cover order form under order options. We need to do this before we publish the event. Now, uh, under order options, order form, I'm going to create a new form. But, uh, if you have other order forms created under other events, you can copy those. What's important to note is that by default, our order form is only going to collect the first name, the last name, and the email of the buyer only. I want you to at least consider what information you would like to collect from the buyer or from your uh from your orders. Do you want to collect just the buyer or would you like to collect information from each attendee? Uh, we generally recommend buyer only because the less information they have to fill, the more likely they are to buy a ticket. But if it's important for you to collect information from each attendee, you have that option. In addition to first name, last name, and email, you can also search for other questions like maybe cell phone. And you can even put in your own custom questions like dietary preferences, t-shirt sizes, transportation options. Um, I'll just do, do you have any dietary restrictions and you can add that as a custom question. You can even make it a a yes or no question. And then you can even add a conditional sub question so that if they answer yes, you can say please list your dietary restrictions and then save. If you have a hundred I have a question here. If you have 100 general admission tickets, can you change the quantity to 150 or do you have to add a second uh general admission ticket to a quantity of 50? On the on that tickets page, you can set whatever quantity you want. Um, essentially here, I'll show you on that tickets page. You just click the edit button here. If I need a 100 tickets, you put a 100 here for that ticket type. If I need 200 tickets or a thousand tickets, you put whatever quantity you want here for that specific ticket type. Now, for my tickets though, I'm only going to do 25 because my uh event capacity is up to 25. So basically you can adjust whatever quantity you want in that uh general admission section or whatever your ticket type is. All right, back to order options order form. So again uh under order options order form, make sure you consider what information you want to collect from the attendee or the buyer.
The next thing you need to consider before publishing your event under order options is this order confirmation. Now, I briefly covered this because someone asked how to print a mobile ticket. Um, short answer is uh you could turn on the printable tickets here at the bottom of the order confirmation page. As long as that's check marked, they will be able to print a ticket. Um, but essentially uh what we need to do is set up not only our order confirmation page. This is the page that populates when they immediately uh purchase a ticket. It'll have what they purchased on their order. Uh, if you have any special instructions like parking instructions, um, you know, items to bring, accommodations, I recommend writing this message for your order confirmation page here. I also recommend putting that important information in your order confirmation email. Order confirmations are automatically sent to attendees when they register for your event, and they're going to include their order details, as well as the PDF tickets if you have that enabled. If you have any important instructions to give attendees, like parking instructions or items to bring, I also recommend filling that out here as well. Okay. So, order form, order confirmation under order options, those are important to fill out before publishing your event.
In addition to that, if you're hosting a paid event, we need to consider all four of these options under payments and tax before we publish the event. So, we're going to cover those here. First, we'll cover payment options. and we need to select our payout country and currency. Now, it's important to note that this payout country and currency can't be changed after an order is made on the event. And if your payout country and currency is not supported, you will be prompted to use PayPal for payment processing. If your country is not listed, you will not be able to use Eventbrite to process payments for paid tickets. Okay. Um after payment options, we'll need to select our payout method. And this is where we need to confirm our bank account for our events. And if you remember from earlier in this uh presentation, I said last week, we talked about setting up our organization settings. Uh that's part of going to the finance page, that building icon on the left hand, and adding our bank accounts. This payout method within the event, this is where we confirm which bank account we want this event to be paid out to. The next thing we need to do is set up the refund settings. We need to set up a refund policy to choose when can attendees request refunds. Now note, if you plan on having no refunds, you need to change that now to no refunds and save it before publishing the event because you will not be able to change that after the event is published. Your refund policy can only be changed to a more flexible policy for the attendee once your event is published. You also will need to consider your tax settings under payments and tax. Now, the tax settings are going to be dependent on the location of your event. For some cities and states, Eventbrite will automatically collect and remit the sales tax. In other cities and states and countries, you may be required to add a sales tax before publishing, and you may be responsible for collecting and remitting those taxes. Regardless of the situation, you'll need to go to this tax settings page under payments and tax and answer these questions that populate and if needed, add a sales tax. Um, and you'll need to do this before publishing the event.
Okay. So, now that's you've done all of these items. You've confirmed your order form, your order confirmation under order options, you've confirmed all four of these items under payments and tax if hosting a paid event. Once we've done all of these things, now we are ready to publish our event. So I went to the publish page on the left hand side here. Now you'll notice here it says an organized by if you have more than one organizer profile set up. That's something that we discussed in our last session of organization settings and account settings. Um, if you have more than one organizer profile, this is where you would choose which organizer profile you'd like to have added to your event. If you click view organizer info, that's where you can see specifically again your organizer profiles that you have set up. In addition to that, if you scroll further down, you could see your event type and category. Now, the computer will try to set your event type and category based off of your event title. It's not perfect. You kind of think of the event category and type as uh like the genre for your event. I do recommend taking a look to make sure that that's accurate. And if not, you can select your own event type and category. And in addition to that, you can add tags. Um I recommend doing all 10 tags if possible. These are keywords that will help attendees find your event. Like rock, you can do concert, you can do uh nightlife, but again, these are keywords that will help attendees find your event. Once you confirm these things, you need to confirm is your event going to be public as in will your event be findable on Eventbrite and search engines or would you like your event to be private? And if your event is private, you can choose your audience of anyone with a link or only people with a password. Um, I'm going to keep my event private because it's a test event and I don't want people to actually show up to my local Waffle House for a journey concert. But if your event is to be public to again be findable on Eventbrite or search engines, you would select private or or public. Um, if you're not ready to publish now, you can even schedule a specific time for your event to be published. my event though, we're going to make it private. Anyone with a link and then once you're ready to publish at the bottom right hand corner, we'll hit the publish button.
Once my event is now published, once I click that button, lo and behold, our event is live, we have published the event. You can even view your event by clicking the view your event at the top right hand corner. This is my live private event. This is what the attendees would see if they were to go to my URL. So again, our event is now live and we can start selling tickets. You'll see uh different options here for marketing your events. I highly encourage you to check those articles out. perhaps take one of our future academy sessions on marketing. Uh our next week's Eventbrite Academy session at this time will be focused on event management now that our event's live and we're selling tickets. uh tune in next week to see uh how to manage basic event management skills. But definitely uh take a look at our Eventbrite Academy, sign up for other classes, learn more about Eventbrite. We wish you all the best. Any questions?
Can the registration link be added to a constant contact? Uh yes. Uh if you go to our dashboard within the event, this event link here is what you would share with people to register for the event. What's really important though is that you copy the entire link including the https colon slash forward slash. If you click this copy link button, it'll copy the entire URL. Something else to consider, if you go to the apps section at the bottom lefthand corner, it's that squares icon. We also have a constant contact integration that you can use uh to sync subscribers from your events, but you'll still, I believe, need to copy and paste that event URL. Any other questions?
Okay. Well, if you do have future questions, if you look at this question mark at the bottom lefthand corner, this is our help center. There's a series of help center articles here. Like if you need to make an online event or a reserved seating event, just about any question you have, there's a help center article here that can help you answer your questions. Again, that's the question mark at the bottom lefthand corner. I want to thank you all for joining me today. I wish you all the best. I hope you take care. Take it easy, everyone.
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