We had virtually no complaints when we did our Data^3 event at Target last March...accept one. We had a guy that has a startup ask for a free ticket. We declined as his attendance rate was 1/19 events. He eventually did reserve a spot and.... Showed up.
Anyways for limited space venues like Target Commons, we felt it was important to fill the space but not exceed the fire marshal room limits of 250. They were weary of setting the limit higher because of no shows plus we asked which box lunch they wanted. We had the correct number of GF, veg and vegan special boxes for the first time! The Target event planning crew (they have dedicated staff for the Commons) thought the reservation deposit was a great idea and had started to do that for their special events at the Skyway Software Symposium they run. We just did a special event with a speaker from Twitter that was in town and didn't use a reserve a spot process... We planned on 30-35% no shows but it was in excess of almost 60%. I was a bit embarrassed because our sponsor bought lots of food and the speaker from Twitter made extra effort to come. I feel the key is to word it correctly by not calling it a ticket but reserve your spot. Processing refunds is pretty easy with EventBrite (but could be easier). So this is a tool in our tool case but not one we use at our monthly meetings. On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 3:00 PM, Don Sheu <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey folks, wondering what approaches folks have to encouraging accurate > RSVPs for events. > > Some of PuPPy's organizers want to charge a fee of $5 over Eventbrite. > Amount would be refunded on check-in. > > Welcome everybody's thoughts and experience on this one. What problem are you trying to solve by making people pay, and how large is the data set of inaccurate RSVPs to accurate attendance for the group? I've found between 60-70% attendance to be the rate with the handful of things I've organized, other organizers I've talked to were roughly in that range, and 0.65 happens to be the number Ned settled on in pizza.py. What have you in seen in that group? _______________________________________________ Group-Organizers mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/group-organizers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.python.org/mailman/private/group-organizers/attachments/20150609/731fd18d/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Group-Organizers mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/group-organizers
