This may be our favourite support ticket of all time!

“We are using your product to schedule training worskhops. EventArc has been an absolute life saver, making scheduling and enrolment for courses quick, efficient and seamless.

We plan to move more of the training scheduling onto EventArc, including the fee paying courses. Thanks heaps for a great product.”

Normally a support ticket means a customer needs help. This one just meant that they loved our service!

Great way to start the day.

Do you run events in order to fundraise for your organisation?

Jade McKenzie recently ran an astoundingly successful movie night fundraiser through Eventarc for her non-profit organisation.  When we say astounding, we mean 400 tickets sold in under a week!  We thought all our customers might benefit from understanding how Jade was able to pull this off, so we asked her for some tips.

Can you tell us a little about the Warwick Foundation?

The Warwick Foundation is Australia’s first and only organisation that supports young adults aged 18 – 40 years old on their cancer journey. Our main program is called ‘Mates In My Shoes’ where we link the …

Most web startups are created by multiple founders, as creating a successful business from scratch is so hard that it helps to have someone to blame when things go wrong.

Or is that someone to share the load?  I’m not sure, I can never remember.

If you are running a startup chances are you have at least one other co-founder.  Often a developer will team up with a “business guy” in order to maximise the chances of success, with each bringing a different set of skills and experience to the relationship.

These differences include entirely different ways of communicating.  You say tomato…

…

When you first launch your web application, there is one MASSIVE hurdle that stands in between you and enormous bundles of cash.  We weren’t initially aware of it ourselves, but over time it became clear.

It’s about conversions.

The path from interested prospect to paying customer is filled with so many holes, walls and mountains that it is a wonder that anyone, anywhere ever gives you any money.

You know that smooth “conversion funnel” you built to allow people to sign up and interact with your product?

It’s really only a funnel shape in your head.  It is not smooth, and it …

In an effort to increase our conversion rates we recently decided to redesign our sign-up page (again). The very first incarnation of this page involved six input fields. We realised this may have been a possible deterrent for users so we stripped it back.

Right back.

Maybe we went a little too far.

OK. We know. Hindsight is 20/20. We now realise it might have been a bit extreme, but we had our reasons at the time.

Pros

• Minimal fields
• Simplicity = no distractions

Cons

• Is this too sparse?
• This doesn’t look like the page I just came from. Where the heck am I?

We’re man enough to admit when we make a mistake (ie: we blamed it on the designer) …

We recently jetted over to SXSW for networking, trade show promotion, learning, beer drinking and way too much Tex Mex food.  Before we left, we had a long hard think about whether we could produce a slightly more interesting business card than our current effort.

We wanted to stand out and be memorable, but after much brainstorming we decided to stick with what we had.

(Editors note:  In this instance, “much brainstorming” is roughly equivalent to about 24 minutes.  We tried!)

Luckily for us, other companies attending the conference were much more creative.  Here are just a few of some sweet looking business cards that we thought worthy of highlighting.  Hopefully they will …

It’s true.

We built our startup in Flex, having spent six months wrestling with HTML/JavaScript and browser compatibility. Flex offered enormous advantages that we just couldn’t overlook, so we dumped six months of development effort and started again .

Adobe have been a great supporter of us for obvious reasons, and we presented during a keynote at one of their recent roadshows.  Like any startup we study the competition, but never did we think we would have to worry about Apple.

Apple vs Adobe

The current Apple vs. Adobe saga has us in a bit of a quandary. With each …

As a new startup, we often review what other successful companies are doing to see what we can learn.

Where have they put their call to action? What copy are they using on the pricing page? Where have they successfully reduced the friction between buyer and seller?

This constant review of “best practice” is enormously beneficial, and we have taken a lot of what we have learned and rolled it into Eventarc.

You need to be careful though.

There are things successful companies do because they are already successful and it NO LONGER MATTERS.  They get away with it, but if you tried the same thing you would die a quick and painful death.

Case in point?  Groupon.

Groupon is a phenomenally …

In so many ways, it is easier than ever before to use social media to promote and announce your fundraising event. But the more difficult tasks are those of engaging and holding people’s attention.

Today, internet users are regularly asked to sign petitions, join mailing lists and attend events for this charity or that social justice campaign. The task of breaking through apathy is today matched by the task of engaging people beyond superficial actions.

Social media – with its potential for dialogue, immediacy and ever-expanding networks – is an important part of establishing a sense of meaning around fundraising events and amplifying …

Just a quick note to let you all know that when you request a feature, we really do listen! One of our most requested features is now live, with event organisers able to copy an existing event with a single click.

Just choose the event you wish to copy in the left hand side tree, and then on the summary tab choose “copy. It’s that simple!

Did you know that it took us just 5 hours to write, test and deploy that feature into the live install of Eventarc? We started it Tuesday morning, and it was live by Tuesday afternoon. It is possible we are more excited by …