Kickback event organiser guide
Introduction
Kickback is a new way to bring cryptoeconomics to meetups to redistribute the Eth participants committed but didn’t turn up. To achieve the maximum result while preventing any confusion among participants and organisers, we have created a quick guide.
Before the event
- Step 0: All in or bit by bit?
- Step 1: Provide the event detail
- Step 2: RSVP yourself to get admin right granted
During the event
- Step 3: Mark participants as checked-in
- Step 4: Remind participants to be marked checked-in
Towards the end of the event
- Step 5: Finalise the event
Step 0: All in or bit by bit?
You can either use Kickback as a sole ticketing service, or you can use along side with traditional ticketing solutions such as meetup.com, EventBrite if you are trying out for the first time.
If you just announce both ticketing at the same time it may confuse people so here are some options we can recommend.
Option A: Release certain slot using existing ticketing (but less than usual), make it full, then release extra spots using Kickback towards people in the wait list.
Option B: Release Kickback spots first as “early bird”, then release traditional ticketing as a fallback plan for people who don’t have ETH.
Option C : Release Kickback and other ticketing at the same time but give extra incentive to those who signed up via Kickback (eg: allocate first row of the venue as “Kickback spots” like VIP spots, airdrop some tokens). If you have nothing to give, then you can also disincentivize non Kickback ticketing (eg: getting ticket via EventBrite does not guarantee the spot but rather first in first served).
(Pro tip for meetup.com users. If you use meetup.com for reaching out to users, people may only RSVP on meetup.com. To avoid that, set the participant capacity of meetup.com to 1 so that no one apart from you can RSVP via meetup.com)
Step 1: Provide the event detail
Creating new event requires us to deploy a new smart contract with 2 million gas cost. The fiat amount varies depends on gas price and ETH price. If the gas cost is 5 gwei, it will cost around 0.012 ETH.
Since we are still working on admin panel to let you create events on your own), we will create the smart contract on your behalf, so please provide the following details.
- Name
- Description = We highly recommend that you mention “cut off time” the maximum time which you allow participants to be marked as checked in.
- Location
- Start and end time
- Event image
- Capacity of your event
- Amount to commit ETH = At least $10 worth of ETH is recommended.
While any metadata (name, description, location, start/end time, event image) can be changed any time with no cost, event capacity is on-chain data and hence it will require gas to change the number (not a lot though). Please be aware that amount to commit cannot be changed once the contract is deployed.
Step 2: RSVP yourself to get admin right granted
By default only the contract owner can check-in participants but the contract owner can grant admin right to other people.
Because we are currently creating the event contract on your behalf, you don’t have the admin right by default.
To obtain the admin right, please sign up and RSVP yourself into the event, so that we can grant admin right to your registered address.
Step 3: Mark participants as checked-in
Once we grant you admin access, you will see “Admin Panel” underneath the RSVP button.
- “Check-in button” = During the event, you can mark/unmark this button as many as you like. This is an intermediary information stored in normal database so pressing this button does not incur any gas.
- Some of the user opt out not to show their avatar photo. The best way to identify the participant is ask their full name which is mandatory information when they sign up.
3. “Search box” = it allows you to filter participants by full name, user name, or their ETH address.
4. “Filter” = as participants turn up, you will be interested in knowing how many people have
5. “Download csv” = If you decide not to use our admin panel but rather prefer to print out the participant detail, you can down load the participant full list. You can contact participants for event related announcement, but you are not allowed to use it to send promotional emails if user has “Marketing opt-in” marked as “denied” at section 6.
Step 4: Remind participants to be marked checked-in.
Once the event starts, quite often event staffs won’t be at the entrance of the venue. You may think that participants will try to find you to make themselves marked but that’s not always the case.
We highly recommend that you remind people from the stage to find you before and towards the end of the event (unless you have cut-off time).
During “Philosopher’s salon event in Prague, turn up rate was around 50% until the end, where a shout out from Chelsea Palmer to the participants who were yet to be marked attended increased the attendance rate to 80%!
The anti-pattern is to just leave a piece of paper and hope everybody write down their names.
This is actually quite dangerous as you may not be able to recognise every single hand writing as well as you could lose the paper which could lead to potential dispute later on.
In normal meetup, check-in process could be very loose and some event organisers may not even mark attendance as long as there is enough capacity at the venue. However, Kickback check-in is one of the most important process and it could incur financial loss to the participants (even though the amount is rather small).
Step 5: Finalise the event
Once the cut off time has reached or the event is getting close to the end, please make sure to press “Finalize” button at “Smart contract” tab on the admin panel. Once your transaction is confirmed, it will show the payout amount which participants can withdraw.
Even though we will send reminder email, please remind people to withdraw their ETH within the cooling period (the default is set to 1 week).
The surprising number of people (10~30%) actually don’t withdraw their ETH which we have donated in the past.
FAQs
Q: Can I add more admins/change capacity/update metadata?
A: Yes and no. If you go to “Smart contract” tab on the admin page, you can see event page with more admin functionalities though the feature is restricted to the event contract owner (by default, us Kickback). We can transfer the ownership to unlock the full features to you but please bear in mind that we (Kickback) lose these powers so we cannot help you in case you got into issues.
Q: Does it cost to use your service?
A: Yes, please refer to our pricing page.
Q: How do I pay you?
We will send an invoice after the event ends so please provide us your organisation name and address to include it. You can either do bank transfer or send us in DAI. In future we will incorporate the payment mechanism into our smart contract.
Q: What happens if we change time/location?
These are meta data so you can change from our admin page. However changing these (especially event date) may stop people from attending so I would advise that you announce the event only after the date becomes certain. Also, please make sure to notify people when the location changes. The last minute location change tends to lead participants getting lost.
Q: What happens to the left over ETH.
You can decide what to do with it. Some event organisers donate to charity/non profit orgs while others keep it to cover our cost.
NOTE: We are planning to change our architecture so that participants do not have to withdraw at the end of each event.
Q: What is your support level?
Majority of our members are based in UK so the core business hours will be 9:00 ~17:00 GMT, Monday to Friday though we will try to respond outside of core business hours when possible. If you encounter any issues, please email us at hello@kickback.events or ask us (Ram, Jeff, or Makoto) at our telegram channel.
Summary
Hope this guide clarifies how you manage your event using Kickback.
If you decide to host your next event using Kickback, please apply here.
