Waiting lists

[William Douglas]

Hi Everyone 

We're kicking around the idea of implementing waiting lists for our Dojos in Western Australia, and I was wondering if anyone has any

advice on the best tools to use. Based on what I've read on other threads, most people that implement them seem to use Eventbrite,

which apparently has a built in function, but we collectively use google groups for our registration process, and I'm not aware of a native

function that might allow this

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks in advance 

William Douglas

Champion

ECU Joondalup CoderDojo, Perth, Western Australia

[Greg Bulmash]

We use Eventbrite, but here are some of the pitfalls.

Eventbrite has an unintuitive interface for managing tickets, so people will place duplicate orders or get confused while trying to cancel an order. You'll have to manually cull for duplicates and manually cancel orders for people who can't figure it out. Also, when you cancel a duplicate order, you'll need to manually send an email to the person who placed it so they don't panic that they're being kicked out of the event.

Eventbrite's waiting list function does not automatically release tickets when they become available. You have to check in periodically, see when spots have opened up, and release tickets.

Eventbrite has a default 16 hours for people to accept the tickets. If you're trying to fill the seats the night before, you may not want to wait for people to respond to the mail from Eventbrite. 

If you're releasing the seats days before, you'll need to check in the day after you released seats, see which people didn't respond, and release those seats to new people. The people who didn't respond will stay on the list, but if you mouse over them, you'll see that they didn't respond and you can sort of move them to the back of the line.

Still, it's better than a ticketing solution that doesn't have a waiting list function and it's free. We use Eventbrite because we can ask things like the student's school grade and experience level, get the parents to agree to the liability waiver, get an idea of how many people will need loaner equipment, and have a list with the parents and children's names for events in secured buildings. 

Hope this provides some help.

- Greg

[Ricky Cheng]

Greg basically summarized Eventbrite waitlist in a nutshell. A few more things I've noticed about it...

- If you release a ticket after the event registration is closed (I believe it's set to a 24 hr period?), the email will get sent out, but they won't be able to register. You'll have to manually register them.

- We've had a lot of issues with people not receiving a released ticket email. Not sure if there's a high frequency of these specific email being marked as spam.

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[Robert Storlind]

Hi William,

CoderDojo Lund has been using Eventbrite for two years but for this term we are giving eventzilla.net a try. My main motivation for the switch is the waiting list functionality.

I've found, and reported, some bugs and have yet to assess Eventzilla's bug fixing responsiveness.

One of the bugs is related to repeating events with waiting lists. Still, I find it manageable and to potential attendees I find the registration form more informative than Eventbrite's, showing free seats/sold out status and offering the waiting list option.

Eventzilla's Android app is less polished than Eventbrite's but still usable.

Best regards,

Robert

[Sandra Maguire (Dun Laoghaire)]

Like many dojos, we started off using Eventbrite in Dun Laoghaire and quickly found a number of limitations -

- We issued a 6 week ticket to start with. Tickets all went very quickly and the waitlist kicked in.  However, because I'd set the event date as being the first of the 6 weeks, the waitlist vanished as Eventbrite assumed the event was over.

- Very limited waitlist information was requested by Eventbrite, I think it was pretty much name and a telephone number.  Many parents were giving a landline number, and there's no way I've time to phone people about a last minute place, I need a mobile number to send a text.  We require parents to stay with kids aged 12 and under, so we need to know the age.  We also ended up with very few girls, so in order to try and have a gender balance, we need to be able to prioritise female applications.

- We started using Google forms for our waitlists instead - have a link on the Eventbrite page as well as on our website.  This way we can gather more information - see here - as required.  We can add in extra detail too, such as the date someone was offered a place and if they accepted or not.

That said, Liam Friel of CoderDojo Bray was recently explaining that rather than having a waitlist, they have a subscription list.  Using Mailchimp, parents can add/remove themselves as required.  Bray send out emails saying there are places available on a first come, first served basis.

We are probably going to do this in Dun Laoghaire.  One of the things that has frustrated me is the number of times I've sent an offer of a place to the next person on the waitlist, only for them to completely ignore it.  It has now got to the point that for every place we have available, I need to offer it to the next 4 or 5 people on the list.  I do feel sorry for those who have been on the waitlist for a long time, so we will offer the places we have available after the half term break to the people longest on the waitlist, but after that we will use Mailchimp.

In relation to Eventbrite itself, we issue tickets that are valid for a term, rather than weekly tickets.  However, I find it quite clunky to use and then have to spend a while exporting the bookings into a format we can work with.  We record attendance in a Google Sheet, and we also need to have emergency contact information to hand.  So for our next batch of places, I'm hoping to use Google forms - using a script to limit the number of responses, I'll email the parents longest on the list and ask them to book that way.  This should prove whether the idea will work properly, and if so we'll use it at the end of the year when everyone is required to re-register for the next term.

I'm not sure I've explained this very well - so please feel free to ask me any questions.  I hope at least it has provided you with some other ideas!

[John R Harrington]

I think it is worth remembering that use of EventBrite is free, and that are plenty of other pay per booking sites and also bolt-on tools out there to supplement the functionality of EventBrite;

 

“123Signup (www.123signup.com)

123Signup is tailored to those managing large events or conferences, with the ability to set registration limits for each session within a multi-track event, to allow one person to pay for someone else’s registration, for attendees to preview and approve their badge, sophisticated discounting ability and more. The company also offers a basic set of association-management tools (including a constituent database and email functionality), which might be useful for organizations with few programs other than events. Many of 123Signup’s clients are trade associations, and the functionality is geared in their direction. 123Signup charges 3.5 percent per registration, with a minimum charge of $1, in additional to standard credit-card fees of about 2.5 percent.

 

RegOnline (www.regonline.com)

Like 123Signup, RegOnline is focused on managing large events, with a similar or even more sophisticated set of features, and has all the same features plus support for more of the “back-end,” or operational processes, such as invoicing. RegOnline charges a fixed price—either $4.75 per registrant, or $150 per event plus $3.50 per registrant—in addition to standard credit-card fees of about 2.5 percent, making it an expensive choice for low-ticket-price events, but attractive for those that charge hundreds of dollars or more.

 

Cvent (www.cvent.com)

This sophisticated online event-management tool includes event-registration functionality, plus support for multi-day, multi-track events; seamless integration with your website; and the ability to export data or create a programmatic feed from Cvent to your database. As Cvent typically has a substantial setup fee to get started, this option makes more sense for those looking to invest in a long-term solution rather than one-time events.

Other event-registration tools targeted toward organizations running large, complex events include Certain (formerly Register123) and eShow.”

 

For anyone needing a primer in using EventBrite, try these videos ;

 

Regards,

John.  

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