How to Improve Attendance of Your Events
Event Planning is Hard
A good event organizer is the one that pours its energy on creating an amazing experience for its attendants. Picking the proper venue, agenda, food, drinks, and date is vital to do so. But, there is a variable that might affect everything else if not handled correctly, the attendance number.
“Easy task, I just need to set up an RSVP or google form on the event page and count the number of registered assistants.” — First-timer organizer
An experienced planner knows that for each event many persons will RSVP and not assist, this is the show rate. If in your event 20 person did RSVP and only 10 arrive, you have a 50% show rate. This rate is directly affected by multiple variables of the event (hour, date, theme, venue, country or culture).
You might try to adapt to the show rate and calculate it beforehand to optimize resources. But, in some cases, it might be unpredictable. For paid events usually, the rate is high, since when someone pays for an event it adds skin to the game and not assisting means losing their money. For free events, making attendees add commitment is complicated without turning it into a paid event.
So how do we improve your show rate on free events?
Enter Kickback
Kickback is a platform that helps event organizers to guarantee a high show rate by making attendees commit to assist. It’s quite simple, you create an event, fill all the information (venue, agenda, date, etc.) and you get a unique URL that can be shared in social media.
In addition to the event general information, you set a value for your attendees to pay when they RSVP.
Here is where things get interesting, the money doesn’t go to the organizers, it goes to a general pool of the event, after the participant checks in at the venue, it’s able to retrieve their commitment money. What is more amazing is that the funds of the ones that didn’t assist will be distributed with the ones that did attend. Assistants will not only recover their funds, but they will also earn money, a feature that you can’t find anywhere else.
To give some numbers, I attended an event where 300 people did RSVP, the commitment was $20.54. In the end, 278 people went to the event (92% show rate), I was able to retrieve $22.18 for just going to an event I already interested to attend.
Having a clear number of attendants will not only help you to improve the overall quality of your event, but It will also allow you to make better decisions and optimize resources. So far Kickback is the best tool to improve your show rate while keeping your events free, use it if you want to regain control of your events.
Even though Kickback is currently in private beta, you are still able to organize and attend events with the platform just contact them at hello@kickback.events or apply for early access here.
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