Organizing an event? Ditch Google Forms, use Luma 🚀

With LauzHack, we’ve organized over 30 tech talks and workshops since 2018. We would use Google Forms for our event sign-ups, until 2023, when we switched to Luma. The non-obvious benefits in participant interaction and event planning are incredible and save so much time. In this post, I go through some of my favorite features, which are not evident until you start using Luma. Best part, it’s all free.

(Thinking about starting a tech club in your community? Check out this post.)

To be fair, it’s amazing all the tools that Google freely provides. Of course, they get a bunch of valuable data from it, but still, would you rather cut down your productivity? (Or pay up for other tools? I digress.) Google Forms is an easy way to get sign-ups for an event. But for me, it’s missing some pretty essential features for organizing events:

• Automated reminder and follow-up emails.
• Setting an event limit.
• Sending a calendar invite.

It could be that I didn’t find those features, but I nonetheless found myself often checking the Google Form entries for the current status of sign-ups.

⚡Enter Lu *dot* ma

Luma caught my attention when I saw other organizers in my community using it for event sign-ups. The design looked sleek. But it was only when signing up for an event I got intrigued, as I received… a calendar invite.

I figured I should give this a shot for LauzHack (expecting a paywall to come up at one point). It was only after creating a LauzHack account and making my first event, I found so many incredible features and all free 👇

Spoiler alert: the last feature is 🔥🔥

✍️ Registration

After creating an event (let’s leave default parameters for now),

under “Registration”, you can add custom questions for your event. Luma already includes questions for email and name.

For the event visual, I’d recommend using Canva or Google Slides. Keep in mind that the aspect ratio (as of Feb 21, 2024) should be 1x1.

✉️ Automating emails

This is where thing start to get interesting.

By default, Luma will send four emails:

• ✅ A confirmation email, immediately after someone signs up for the event. If your event has automatic approval (more on that below), they will receive a calendar invite in that confirmation.
• ⏰ Two reminder emails (1 day before the event and 1 hour before the event).
• ❓ A follow-up email to get event feedback.

You can (1) modify when the reminder and follow-up emails are sent, (2) customize their content (for example, I would add the event location in the reminder title), and (3) add additional reminder emails (but it’s best not too flood your guests with emails).

The follow-up email includes a small feedback form which is a nice feature, as we could go to our sponsors/speakers with quantitative and qualitative information to improve for future events.

Overview of feedback after an event.

At any time, you can also an email to your guests under “Posts”.

Instantaneously send or schedule a post.

Similar to Mailchimp, you have stats on who has received/opened any of your emails.

🧠 Memorable URL

The best thing you could do with Google Forms is shorten the URL to a (less) ugly string of random characters. For EPFL’ers, you could use go.epfl.ch to create a more memorable link 😉

With Luma, under the “More” tab and “Event Page”, you can set a more intuitive URL (as long as someone else hasn’t already taken it).

UPDATE (25/05/2024): this now seems to be a paid feature.

📋 Managing guests

From the “Registration” tab, you can set an event capacity so that you don’t accept more people than your event/space can handle. This avoids having to periodically check your sign-up page to close registration when capacity is reached.

You can also turn off automatic approval, in case you don’t want participants to be directly accepted when they sign up. Note that they won’t get a calendar invite until you approve them.

You can then manually approve guests from the “Guests” tab.

To accept/reject multiple people at once, press the button shown below:

And from the page that appears, you can accept/reject multiple people from the “Bulk Actions” drop-down.

If a guest tells you they can no longer make it, you can manually edit their status as “Not going” (as well as other registration info).

If the guest goes to the event page, they can also do it themselves.

Guest view.

✅ In-person check-in

Approved guests receive a digital ticket (QR code) for the event. On the organizer side, you can download the Luma app (Android or iOS) to check-in guests. After many events, this can provide insightful stats on your events’ no-show rate, which is useful when ordering food or talking with sponsors.

🚘 Traffic

Under “Insights”, you can view internet traffic to your event’s page. This can be interest to correlate with different promotion strategies, e.g. when you post on social media, when you ask other organization’s to post on social media, when you send an email to mailing lists, when you put up posters, etc.

🔥 Creating another event

This is where things get very interesting!

One frustration I had with Google Forms was duplicating the form to make a new event. Copying, renaming, and moving files on Google Drive, no thank you 🙅‍♂️

With Luma, go to the “More” tab and under “Clone Event”, enter the date for the new event, and click the “Clone Event” button. All your settings from the original event will be copied over to the new event! (automated emails, registration questions, etc). This feature has saved so much time when planning a new event!

In summary…

Luma is a great platform for managing events, full of very practical features which are not obvious until you start using it. Most of all, I’m so surprised it’s free (and hope it stays that way). Another thing that impressed me (which isn’t a feature) was that when I had a technical issue and wrote to Luma support, Victor Pontis (the CTO himself!) responded. Cool stuff and kudos to the Luma team for their amazing work 👏👏