Hi Jessica,
We use Eventbrite for events such as lectures and family programs and find it to be really useful. For some context - we are a fairly small science education institution and historic natural history museum, budget around $1m, 11 FT staff. We also have an old website that does not allow us to build our own event registration/ticketing system, which is why we went to a third party. As a program manager, I've found Eventbrite to be a good, intuitive way to manage event attendance. They have tools for making a wait list, printing reports, and printing check-in lists. We don't use this feature but they also have smartphone integration using QR codes, so if you wanted to scan people's tickets at the door of your event, you could do that. A useful tool that I use, too, is the ability to create dedicated URLs for different efforts, so for instance, I create a different URL for an event to put in our newsletter and another to send to personal contacts, and then I can track which links are being clicked so I can measure the effectiveness of different marketing efforts.
I think that people are generally familiar with Eventbrite these days (at least people of a certain age). For those who aren't familiar, I think it's easy to use. Another positive is that it comes along with its own marketing - sometimes people will tell us that they found out about our event through Eventbrite and not from our own website or our own marketing efforts. When users log into Eventbrite the home page shows nearby events that they might be interested in, so sometimes your event will be promoted without you having to do anything!
The one downside I will say is that I don't like to be directing people away from our website to register for events. It essentially means our event is described in two places - on a page from our own website and on the Eventbrite page, and there isn't much reason for someone who finds our event on Eventbrite to go to our website and learn more about us in general. In that sense it would be much better for us to have something integrated into our website (which I am not sure if Eventbrite does), but we simply can't do it right now with our outdated technology infrastructure.
Hope this is helpful!
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Cara Scharf
Program and Communications Manager
Wagner Free Institute of Science
Philadelphia PA
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-11-2015 04:40 PM
From: Jessica Hougen
Subject: Eventbrite
Hello All,
I'm looking for feedback from museums that have used Eventbrite. Pros, cons, anything would be helpful. Thanks!
Best,
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Jessica Hougen
Curator
U.S. Marshals Museum
Fort Smith AR
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