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 newly diagnosed with survivors to form a support network. I encourage you to go to our website and read our members stories.

What are your main fundraising strategies?

Our fundraising mainly comes through events. We hold a minimum of three official events per year and we aim to do events that are fun, uplifting and that people want to come back to.

How you raise funds profitably via events?

Running events is definitely profitable if you do it right. The key is to keep the overheads low whilst charging attendees a fair price for the benefits they receive.

You mainly raise money through the entry fee but you also raise funds through the little add ons such as raffles, silent auctions, food and drink stalls, collection tins etc. There are many cost effective ways to encourage people to give up their loose change which definitely adds up!

You recently ran a movie night fundraiser which was very successful. How did you get such a great outcome?

To get such a great outcome I had to identify what my target market was going to be, what movie they would want to see and how I could make this event feel exclusive. I must have picked the right movie because our two screenings sold out in about a week!

If you want to run a movie night for your own organisation or hold any sort of fundraising event, you need to choose something that people in your database can identify with and will want to come to.

From there, you decide what benefits you would like to offer them to encourage them to pick your event over another organisations. In this case we had gift bags worth more than the ticket price, champagne and canapés and the opportunity to win raffle and spot prizes worth up to $1,100. Pretty good for the price of a movie ticket!

Why did you choose to use online registration, and how was the experience?

I had always manually processed movie night payments in the past and I knew that there had to be a better solution. I looked at a number of services, both Australian and International, and found that Eventarc was the one that suited my needs perfectly.

Using Eventarc was a great user experience. The fact that you can tailor it to suit your needs means that you have the freedom to run your event the way you want to. The reporting function was something that I used many a time and never failed to impress me.

When I had some technical queries it took less than an hour (sometimes less than 5 minutes!) for someone to get back to me!

This was definitely something I haven’t experienced with many of my service providers in the past.

You would be silly not to use Eventarc for your next event.

What advice would you give others considering running a fundraising event?

Do your database research! Your database is made up of many different types of people and they will want to go to different things. Identify your biggest markets and work with it. Make sure that you have a variety of events so people will attend at least one event a year which will help cement that relationship between them and your cause.

What events have you got coming up that people should keep an eye out for?

Our third annual gala is on Friday 8th October at the Peninsula, Docklands and this is definitely one to keep an eye out for! With our famous celebrity shoe auction, our silent auction, a three course dinner and music from one of the hottest bands in Melbourne you definitely won’t want to miss out!

Anything else we should know that you would like to share?

Just that I am in love with Eventarc!

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…

It works the other way as well you know……

At least there is one thing we all agree on….

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 is most definitely NOT linear.  Customers don’t gleefully slide down it as they rush to give you their cash.

The path from prospect to paying customer is in fact a fetid swamp, inhabited by lightning sand, jets of flame and rodents of unusual size.  This swamp sits at the bottom of a deep chasm through which only the truly motivated cross.

If you think of it in this way rather than as a smooth funnel, then you will know how hard you have to work to convert prospects into customers.  Really hard.

Here then in all its glory is our conversion funnel (with apologies in advance to The Princess Bride).  In the interests of transparency, we have included REAL DATA from our performance from January to April 2010.

That’s right.  The percentages discussed at the bottom of this post are real live results from our actual business.

The players in this love story for the ages are the prospective customer (whom we shall call Westley) and the paying customer (Buttercup).

We want Westley to reach Buttercup and become a paying customer, but to get there he needs to travel through our conversion path.  If we start with 1,000 Westleys, how many can we help make a perfect match with Buttercup?

Westley starts his journey to find true love (i.e.  give us money!) on our website.  To get from our homepage to the account registration page, he must first traverse the dreaded Cliffs of Insanity.

Unfortunately, over 917 Westleys prove no match for the cliffs and are unable to find their way to our registration page.  However 83 brave souls do reach the top, where they are given the option of creating an account for our product.

Now you thought that creating an account was just a matter of filling in a form?  Afraid not.  To create an account Westley must face off against Inigo Montoya, the finest swordsman that ever lived.

While each Westley puts up a brave front, just over half are slayed at the registration page and do not make an account.  The 37 that do make it (none of whom were left handed), create an account and proceed onwards and upwards into the application.

Deep within the application, we now need our brave heroes to take action and create their first event!

Easy I hear you say? (Well yes with our interface it is very easy, but that’s another story).

Unfortunately, not all 37 adventurers create an event after signing up.  Some are thwarted by Fezzik:

while others fail the battle of wits test (yes……..we know………inconceivable).

Of our 37, just 10 are able to navigate the treacherous path and successfully create an event.

Our 10 Westleys are now just moments away from Buttercup (becoming a paying customer!), but have one last hurdle to overcome.  To enter their payment details, they must cross the dreaded fire swamp!

Finally, 3 brave Westleys emerge unscathed on the other side  of the fire swamp to become living, breathing, actual paying customers.

For those following along at home, we started with 1,000 Westleys and managed to convince 10 (or 1%) to create an event.    Only 3 (0.3%) become paying customers however, which is lower than the acceptable minimum of 1% paying customer conversion.

By the way.  If you read this article and did not immediately create an account and become a paying customer, all you did was make our conversion statistics worse!

Seriously we don’t know how you can live with yourself…go and signup now!

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) so we went back and redesigned the page.

Noteworthy

• We get really positive feedback from people who have used Eventarc. We thought it would be good to share it with potential new users to assuage any concerns they might have about creating an account with us.
• We’re FREE to use for free events. This message bears repeating. FREE I says, FREE!
• You can now easily jump back into the rest of the website through the footer links
• Big fields. No more squinting.

So, what do YOU think of our new signup page?*

* commence the nervous wringing of hands

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 give you some ideas next time you are looking for inspiration?

Lets kick off with the Big Daddy of them all, Google.

Okay pretty boring I know, but it does at least have a QMcode on the back.  Good for quickly getting your data into someones smart phone.

Some interesting shapes here:

Then there is this one from Chris Pirillo.

I love the thought that has gone into the back of that one.  It leaves you in no doubt as to how successful Chris has been, including the “#1 Chris on Google”!  Nice.

This one from Sweet Mobile Apps has a great play on the name, with a nutritional breakdown of their product (but unfortunately no URL?).

And finally, the best of them all.  As a concept this wins hands down for creativity and execution, not least because it now has my head on it!

Vitorio Miliano is a great guy if you ever get to meet him.  We spent many hours discussing the web over a number of glasses of lager, and when I saw his business card I pretty much demanded that he give me one!

It involved 1 Instamatic camera and 1 sticker to add to the back of the photo.

That’s Vitorio on the right, and a particularly bald looking Scott on the left.

So simple, yet so brilliant.

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 new revelation – culminating in the change to Section 3.3.1 of its Developer Licensing Agreement – it has become clear that Apple is not just dismissing Flash as buggy or slow.  Adobe can improve Flash and address the concerns of Apple all they want, but it won’t make a lick of difference..

Make no mistake – Apple is making a strategic business decision to bar Flash from the walled garden entirely.

The licensing change canned the new CS5 feature which allowed the Flash platform to compile to a native iPhone (or iPad) binary. It was Adobe’s attempt at an end-run around Apple’s earlier exclusion of the Flash runtime in not only the Mobile Safari web browser, but in any apps submitted for approval to the App Store.

Sorry Adobe.  Apple says No.

Why should we care?

Since launching the iPhone, and in particular the App Store, Apple has rapidly gained around 25% of the US smart phone market. Developers and end-users alike have flocked to the platform. Apple have continued this march on the mobile computing arena with the launch of the iPad.

Like many startups, we had plans to join that wave. Even though our primary user interface was written in Flex, we planned on developing an iPhone app available for our users as a key part of our strategy.

The Flash CS5 export feature seemed the perfect choice. We could write an app for the iPhone with a limited feature-set and Apple UI components, but for the iPad we could build an app very similar to our current rich internet application. That grand scheme came crashing to a halt when Apple changed the Developer Agreement.

But perhaps more important than our ability to easily compile our product into a working iPad/iPhone application is the future of Flash in general.  Apple’s star continues to rise with significant share of the mobile market, and it is fairly clear Flash plays no part in their plans.

This raises two burning questions:

Should we pivot and embrace an Apple friendly technology, before we get wiped out in the stampede of mobile devices?

and

Should new startups avoid Flash/Flex as a technology choice?

Before we answer, let’s consider why we chose Flex in the first place.

You chose Flex?  Are you nuts?

It was a conscious and educated decision to use Flex.  We don’t regret it.

Our decision to use Flex for our user interface was based on quite a few factors, including the Flash experience of our lead developer. Flex offered us the best opportunity to rapidly progress from an idea to a product. For a startup, this is critical.

The interface we were aiming for was advanced in terms of the functionality we wanted to deliver to the customer, and the interactivity of Flex was an excellent fit.

At first we were concerned about the availability of Flash.  It turns out however that Flash has made leaps and bounds in market penetration in recent years, hitting 98% penetration of internet connected computers. Compare this to the number of people using outdated browsers that makes rich internet application development in HTML/Javascript a compatibility nightmare, and Flex becomes a serious contender.

Right tool, right job.

We still had some concerns with Flex. We have always been proponents of open source platforms, doing nearly all of our server side web application development in PHP, MySQL, Linux, Kohana and Eclipse. Although most of Flex is open source, some is not (the Flex Builder application and of course the Flash Player itself). Add to this the fact that even we have our share of Adobe Support horror stories and you can see why we might have balked at implementing our baby on their platform.

Overall though we strongly believe we made the right choice.  Our speed of development has been quicker, our features richer and our browser testing regime smaller.  Flex was and is the right tool for our particular needs.

Flash does have a use by date however. Sooner or later, browsers will be able to do what previously needed a plugin. It has already begun with the adoption of of HTML5 by some browsers.

Is this use by date going to be in the next couple of years? It’s highly unlikely. While HTML5 is an exciting open standard in theory, in practice there are browser compatibility issues even amongst early adopters like Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Okay you built it in Flex – what’s your next move?

If like us you built your startup in Flex or Flash, then you have at least five areas for which you need a solution.

Browser based via a Desktop Computer

You already have a solution, and it’s called your existing application.  Yes Flash has a use by date, but it’s not likely to be in the next five years.  Stick with what you have and build the best damn product you possibly can.  Focus on the customer, not the tech.

Status: No change required

Desktop Program

While not everyone needs to consider this, we think it has potential for our ticketing application.  Imagine processing entries to a music festival set in a farmers paddock – wouldn’t it be nice to do that on a desktop app and not have to worry about dodgy 3G connections?

Here our choice of Flex is in a class of its own.  It is relatively trivial to port our code base to an Air application, giving us the best of both words.

Status: No change required

Mobile device running Android

Android will support flash, and it is clear they intend to support it for the foreseeable future.  Like us you may be better off writing a specific mobile view for an android enabled device, but you would have had to do this anyway if you had written your app in HTML/JavaScript.

Status: No change required

iPhone

Here you have two possible scenarios.

1.  Write a dedicated app

2.  Write a specific web view

Either option requires development, but both also would have been required if you had written your app in JavaScript.  It is technically true the iPhone will render a native HTML/JS app right now, but anyone serious about this platform is doing the work to make it iPhone specific.

Status: Write a specific app or web view

iPad

This one has the potential for the most amount of rework.  The larger screen size makes it likely that an existing HTML/JavaScript web application will look perfectly fine on an iPad without any extra work.  Yours and our flex/flash apps will look completely pants.

In the interim, you can take the work you have already done on the iPhone (that you would have had to do anyway) and port that across.  Job done.

But you know what the real answer is?

iPad Schmipad.

It’s a device that has been out for under a month and is still only available in the US.  No-one but early adopters have one, and the actual success of the device is still up for grabs.

We’re not saying it has no chance of completely disrupting the laptop/mobile device market, only that you should wait until it does before making any critical development decisions.

Take the Public Enemy approach until the numbers are in.  Don’t believe the hype.

And if we are wrong about the lifespan of Flash?

We were wrong once back in 1991, but no-one remembers that and all records were suppressed.

But okay…on the off chance that we are wrong for the second time in our lives, the solution is easy.  We make a technology pivot, and move away from flash to whatever is the best fit for our model and our customers.

As we were developing our application, we paid special attention to how it interacted with the back end. From the start we felt the best way to do that was to create our own API, making even our own application interact with our data through the API. This left our Flex application as responsible for the user interface, not the application itself.

How does this help?

It allows us to change the interface if needed without a complete re-write. It also allows us to build complementary applications on other platforms – as we were intending for Apple’s iPhone. This should mean that even if Flex/Flash does have a shelf-life, we can adapt.

“There is no standing still on the web“.

What should others do?

If you already have a Flex/Flash app, be happy you got off your bum and launched something.  Good for you!  Flash remains  pervasive and will be for the foreseeable future, so unless mobile is your entire business model, stick with it.

If you are just starting out and still to choose your platform, our advice is this.  Choose the right tool for the right job.  Don’t just jump onto Ruby on Rails or HTML5 because all the cool kids are.  If you have a specific problem to solve, think about the best way to solve it and then pick the right tool.

If you don’t have a specific problem to solve, then you have much bigger problems and we can’t help you.  Go straight to the Deadpool, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Otherwise, enjoy startup life.  It’s never boring!

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 successful group buying site, rumored to be doing hundred of millions in revenue annually.  They made it to product to market fit, and are now scaling as fast as they can.

This is the homepage the Groupon site delivers to me.

Okay I don’t live in Honolulu, but they did their best to get as close to Melbourne as they could.

What stands out for me though is that they require you to sign up with your email address before you can access the site.  Lets just repeat that.

You have to give them your email address and subscribe, before you can even see the deal

Wow.

They get away with this because it no longer matters.  Their revenue is so large and their product so successful, that the customer abandonment from implementing this policy is probably negligible.

Not everything successful companies are doing is worth copying.

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 other kinds of marketing.

Where do you begin?

The obvious sites to begin with online promotion are those places you know and use. If you have a network of interested people accessible via Facebook, Twitter or blogs, it makes sense to start there. And the “you” here means the person chiefly in charge of social media work at your organisation – but it should encompass everyone directly involved in the project.

The internet may offer expansive horizons, but we most often act on the recommendations and guidance of those we already know and trust. Most likely to become enthusiastic are friends and those people who already support your organisation. These two groups are also the most likely to pass on information to other people they know.

Beyond this initial release of information, the tactics for online promotion are those that are tried and true offline. It is too easy to get lost in the bright lights of social media – the fancy new technology – and forget the basics: engage people, respond to them, tell them all you can. You answer the phone if it rings in your office, so answer the tweets and messages when they are directed at you online.

Using the Twitter Hashtag

Technology can help you keep track of discussion and ensure that a broad range of people know about your event. The hashtag function of Twitter is one way to promote and then monitor discussion around an event.

Establishing an easily memorable hashtag term is now one of the earliest tasks to undertake. Kick this off yourself and ensure – in the least intrusive ways possible – that others continue to use the tag in their tweets. If you can successfully manage this, the conversation can then easily be tracked. Be sure to respond and integrate users into your replies. A site like hashtags.org allows you to search for specific tags, find relevant tweets and note the trends over hours, days and weeks.

Engaging users in dialogue, so that their followers then pay attention, will help spill beyond your initial pool of Twitter followers. Be sure that your Twitter profile includes a link to your main website – a piqued interest must be allowed to follow its path! Likewise, any event website should have a button allowing people to easily “share” the URL or information with others. (Do the same in any newsletters you send out – it’s worth it.)

Frequency of Updates

Discussion and excitement about an event will only continue if the online presence is an active one. Our attention span online can be incredibly short, the taste for novelty incredibly strong. A regular dripfeed is better than an initial flood of information. Popping up again and again on update feeds with quality news, links and information will serve the dual purpose of informing people and attracting attention. Retweeting and Facebook sharing are more likely if users think the content is original, inspiring or important.

Focus intently on a few sites – I am favouring Twitter and Facebook here as they are, for now, the biggest and most active networks – rather than spread yourself thinly across every possible outlet. For example, it’s probably not worth bothering with Myspace these days, as it is used by fewer and fewer people. Likewise, anything that is too new – anything that has not reached tipping point – is likely to service a too-small community. The stretched resources of most charities and not-for-profits need to be used wisely.

If you have a larger budget or a particularly energetic group, put some time into creating the type of content that procrastinating people online love to share: videos, quizzes, apps for their phones. These can be hard to do in a way that doesn’t seem token or naff. So perhaps this is only worth pursing if you have a strong concept – rather than simply for the sake of it.

And that’s a worthwhile approach to using social media in general:

Use it with a strong idea in mind and commitment to doing it properly.

Your event will attract positive attention if the online presence feels genuine, committed and meaningful. Users tend to respond to a sense of real excitement and enthusiasm around an event – while running away from anything that smells too strongly of stale PR. Social media can allow you to cover new territory, find new supporters and generate interest in your event – but it can also be a tool for giving everyone a flavour of your organisation and what it does.

How have you used social media to promote your events?

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 that fact than any of our customers are, but when you have a quick win you have to celebrate right?

Do let us know if there is anything else you want to see in Eventarc, because we’re on a roll!