We were recently interviewed on TheNextWeb on what it is like running a startup in Melbourne.  The resulting video is embedded below!

Not everything we do here at Eventarc is commercially driven.

We know that to build a great business, we need to do more than just make a profit.  With that in mind, we are pleased to announce that Eventarc will be providing online registration and ticketing services for free to the fantastic Choir of Hope and Inspiration (formerly the Choir of Hard Knocks) for the next 12 months.

Those of us who sat glued to the ABC in 2007 will remember the Choir well.  Entertaining, amusing, and educational, the documentary that tracked the progress of the Choir won the Logie for “Most Oustanding Factual Documentary TV Series”.

The Choir followed that with ARIA awards for Best TV Soundtrack, a Platinum ARIA award for their first CD “Songs from the TV Series” and a Gold ARIA award for their second CD “Songs of Hope and Inspiration”. The Choir also received a coveted Helpmann Award for Most Outstanding Special Event, for their sell out concerts at the Sydney Opera House in 2007.

Who are the Choir?

Created specifically for people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage, the Choir of Hope and Inspiration began rehearsing in September 2006 under the leadership of Founding Music Director, Dr Jonathon Welch AM.  Now four years on, the Choir still rehearses every Wednesday. Most importantly, the ongoing and regular contact the Choir provides to the members has had a profound effect on their lives, leading many of the original 52 back to either part time or full time study or work.

We are wrapped to be associated with such a fantastic initiative, and look forward to a long and lasting partnership!

You can find out about upcoming events and support the Choir by visiting http://www.choirofhopeandinspiration.com.

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!

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!

A few weeks ago we rolled in a number of cool new features to Eventarc, making the service even more powerful for event organisers.  There is only one thing we forgot to do, and that was tell anyone about it!  In our defence, we were somewhat preoccupied with our trip to SXSW in Texas.

Now that we are back down under and fully recovered from the jet lag, here are a few of those features that you have already had access to for the last 3 weeks!

New Dashboard View

We have updated the information available on your Eventarc dashboard to make it cleaner, clearer and more focused on the important information.  You now have immediate access to tickets sold and revenue raised, as well as the ability to edit key event information straight from the dashboard.

Editing Tickets

When we first launched Eventarc late last year, we didn’t include the ability to be able to edit your tickets after the event had been published.  This was frustrating for many, so we have now enabled that for all current and future events.  You can now edit the name and quantity of your tickets, as well as add completely new ones at any time.

Deleting an Attendee

You can now easily remove an attendee that no longer wishes to attend your event.  Just hit the little red cross next to their attendee details and Eventarc takes care of the rest (including putting their ticket back into the general pool for another customer to buy).

Social Media Promotion for Event Organisers

You’ve made your event, and you are ready to sell the tickets.  How do you go about getting the word out?  Social media is one important aspect of event promotion, and we have built the links right into the interface for you.  Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and more are now all there for you to promote your event to your existing networks and their friends.

Eventarc Stock images for your Events

Not everyone has a graphic designer sitting around ready to whip up images for an event registration page, so we are now providing stock images that anyone can use.  At the moment there are only a few, but we will be adding many more over the next few months.  If you have a suggestion for one that you think would be useful, please drop us a line.

Let us know if there are any other features you want to see added in the future!

Adobe held their Refresh Roadshow 2010 in Melbourne yesterday, and it seemed to be pretty well attended by the Melbourne design and development community.  We were fortunate enough to be invited to demonstrate our product and engage in a bit of friendly Q&A during the morning keynote.

Our product is built using Adobe Flex, so it gave us the opportunity to demonstrate some of the awesome features and explain why it was the best product choice for us.  Flex really has given us the ability to develop quicker and with higher quality, given the interface we are trying to produce for our customers.

Thanks should go out to Andrew Spaulding from Adobe for inviting us along (shown above on the right).  Thanks Andrew!

Representing Eventarc on stage was co-founder and lead developer Andrew Edwards (shown below).

Did you know that by using Eventarc, your customers can help to promote your event for you? We recently added a social media icon set to the confirmation page of every event, allowing your ticket buyers to promote and talk about your event via their existing networks.

A great example of this in action is the use of Twitter for the 2010 Mother’s Day Classic. Online registration for this event is driven by Eventarc, and users can promote the fact that they have signed up by “tweeting” the event.

Both @AmyLeeBent and @ReneeBelsey are getting into the swing of it!

The full social media icon set includes email, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Digg, Delicious, Linkedin and Reddit.

You may have heard already, but Eventarc will be in attendance at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. We are all very excited at the opportunity, and cannot wait to meet some of our international customers and friends.

Why are we going?

Good question. Actually, we have been selected to attend the festival as part of a Victorian Government Trade Mission. The mission is organised by our friends at Portable, and funding is thanks to the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development.

Only six companies were selected, and we are honoured and excited that Eventarc was one of them.

What is the SXSW Festival?

Well, in their own words:

SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer.

Eventarc will have a booth there where we will be demonstrating and talking about our product, so if you plan to attend we would love for you to drop in and say hello!

It has been a busy year for the team here at Eventarc, but we have plenty more planned for 2010.

Thank you to all our customers who have signed up to use Eventarc over the last few months. Your usage of our product is truly appreciated, and we look forward to supporting you with many more events in 2010.

For those yet to have a play, check out our new 3 minute screencast for a quick tutorial on how to get started. You might also want to have a read of some independent media coverage about Eventarc, meet the Eventarc Team, or just see where we work.

Eventarc Usage

We launched our free version of Eventarc in September 09, with the paid version following shortly after in November. Despite our recent beginnings, usage of Eventarc and traffic to our site has been phenomenal.

Almost 200 people have signed up to play with and use Eventarc for their event registration, while traffic to the site during November jumped a whopping 423%.

Thank you to all our customers who have made this growth possible – we really appreciate it!

Features Due In Early 2010

We are working hard to add even more useful features to our software, and have already detailed a few major enhancements that are due in early 2010. These include:

• Integration with PayPal accounts
• The ability to make registration for your event private
• Copy an existing event, which means you don’t have to enter the same data twice
• Email marketing functionality from within the Eventarc application
• iPhone specific views for all your event registration forms
• Social media integration
• Ability to delete an attendee and add their ticket back to the overall event volume
• Edit any details that an attendee has entered
• Edit the number and type of tickets available after your event has been published

and many more to come, including a few secret ones!

Nominate us for the Next Web Australian Startup Awards

Have you tried Eventarc and think it is pretty cool?

Do you think Eventarc might be the biggest thing to hit the web since the Sneezing Panda? Then please vote for us in the Next Web Australian Startup Awards!

We might be a little biased, but you could nominate us for Best New Australian Startup! Nominations close on December 31st 2009, so you better get in quick.

Arrangements for the Holiday Period

Eventarc is here to assist you with any event registration requirements you have over the holiday period.

While the office itself will be shut from the 23rd of December 2009 to the 4th of January 2010, Eventarc will continue to operate as normal.

Your registration pages and events will continue to function 24 x 7, with no interruption of service. All support emails and issues will continue to be checked and responded to daily.

From all of us here at Eventarc we wish you a fantastic holiday break and an enjoyable new year. We will be back fresher and keener than ever to make your events a success!