How Kickback (formerly known as BlockParty) Can Decrease No-Shows At Your Next Event
Planning a free event at Web3 summit, DevCon4, or any other upcoming blockchain-related events? BlockParty has your back.
The dilemma of free events.
Like last year’s DevCon3 and upcoming Berlin BlockChain week, we expect that many companies are going to plan events in Prague during DevCon4.
And as an event organiser, you will face some dilemma. If you let anyone come, your event may get overcrowded or run out of food and drink, making everybody unhappy. But, if you try to strictly manage using traditional ticketing system like meetup.com or eventbrite, people try to get spots regardless of their intention to come, or not. Your event may become full very quickly but you (and your sponsor) may face the disappointment on the day of the event with low turn out and wasted food. The most pragmatic approach is to charge a small fee ($5~10), but you may lose out to other events which offer free events. Also offering free events really shows off your support to its community members.
But we have some good news: BlockParty is your solution to all of these problems! So if you’re planning an event around DevCon4, or any other upcoming blockchain-related events, we want to hear from you!
The upcoming Berlin blockchain week during ETHBerlin is already packed with many events
What BlockParty can offer
For those of you who are not familiar, BlockParty is an Ethereum-based event management smart contract. It’s very simple: you pay a small deposit when you RSVP, and you lose your deposit if you don’t turn up. If you do show up, you get your deposit back + we split the deposit of those who did not turn up. You go to a party and may end up getting more money!
We have used BlockParty at DevCon2 (Shanghai), DevCon3 (Shanghai), EDCON 2017, and Ethcc conf (both in Paris) as well as at my local meetups (London Ethereum Codeup, piloting at Ethereum London), and at ENS Hackathon. Also back in June, Josef Jelacic bravely deployed the smart contract and gave away some free spots using BlockParty all by himself.
Using BlockParty, the average no-show rate drops down to around 10%, as opposed to the 50% we see at most free events (see this article for more detail).
In addition to preventing no shows, BlockParty brings a bit of excitement in terms of finding out who actually didn’t turn up. In traditional events, turning up to empty events is not cool, and a disappointment to participants, but it is welcomed with BlockParty. We jokingly often say that “unfortunately, everybody turned up!”
BlockParty x Status Incubate
Until recently, I was a bit wary of opening up BlockParty to other events, as BlockParty was more of a proof of concept only maintained and ran by me.
With the recent announcement of BlockParty being backed by Status Incubate, we finally have a chance to do it properly. We will be working hard to make the Dapp scalable to be able to host multiple events.
We will be looking for several other (brave) meetups to host free events using this bleeding edge BlockParty prior to/during DevCon4.
By hosting your meetup on BlockParty, you (and your participants) will have a chance to experience the future of free events based on Cryptoeconomics, and thus stand out from the crowded DevCon4 event space.
How much is the gas cost?
In terms of gas cost (which you pay to Etherem miners), it depends on the gas price.
In the lucky scenario of gas price being 1~5gwei, it will cost around 1~5 USD to deploy the smart contract (show below as create ). The marking attendees (shown below as batchAttend) linearly increases depending on the number of participants.
As a participant, you need to call register and withdraw which will cost a few cents each. In case participants fail to withdraw within a cooling period (default to 1 week), the event owner can collect their deposit (though event organisers usually remind participants even after the cooling period so that majority of people withdraw).
That’s the best case scenario. The gas price has been quite volatile for the last few months ranging between 2~60gwei. The smart contract can be deployed while gas price is low but participants have to RSVP prior to your event which sometimes forces them to pay a few USD and may anger some of them.
Just to warn you, using BlockParty does not instantly fill up your event as you will be facing “six different characters” and you have to handle them accordingly. We are happy to help you to handle this new event incentive mechanism with our experience.
How do you apply?
If you are interested in using BlockParty for your DevCon4 (or any other big Ethereum related events), please get in touch by filling out this form.
We’re aiming to support different kinds of meetups, so that we can understand the different needs of event organizers in the community. (Just a note: to be able to best ensure the success of your event, we’ll be selecting limiting number of event partners to work with more closely).
I hope that you’re excited to try out BlockParty (now rebranded to Kickback)for your event, so make sure to fill out the form above. And if you have any questions, please feel free to email us at hello@kickback.events . Party on!
