just an asterisk

I’d like to tell you about a cool way to organize events and send out invitations online. It’s like www.evite.com except much, much better.

To start, evite.com wasn’t meant to cater to the business market while www.eventbrite.com does. (At some point they will probably stop being free and offer a premium version of their service.) I don’t know about you but I’ve never been satisfied with Evite.com – they don’t have an overarching theme. They’re still sort of a playful idea (with ads) instead of a proper site.

My biggest gripe has been the inability to click a button on the website and add a task to my calendar – Outlook or Google Calendar. This might seem like a small quibble but what’s the use of accepting an invite, especially one far off into the future, if the site cannot add it to your calendar so that you will actually show up. We live in modern times so I see no reason to have to use my brain to do menial stuff like remembering an invitation when they’re so many devices and websites that can do it for me. EventBrite will allow you to add the event to Outlook, Google, Yahoo, or get the iCal to add the event to whatever program you want!

Now most of us will not use all of the glitzy features of EventBrite but it’s not just for the suits. You can share your event on Facebook. What if you’re going to this really cool (to you at least) Pearl conference and you know that all your friends will want to know about it. Well you can simply post it to Facebook. In fact, you can also post to all the standard sites – Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us.

There’s a Google map image showing you the area where the event is right on the same page. No need to copy and paste to Google maps. And if you don’t like Google maps, with a simple click you can get to Yahoo, Mapquest or Microsoft maps. Again, it just makes sense. People want to know where the event is so they put in a map. As the Guinness commercials would say, “Brilliant!” None of these features are new or even that special; everyone has come across these features on different sites before and found them handy. What I find ingenious about EventBrite is that they have done their homework; they have all the simple, handy, online features we’ve come to love all in their site.

Now EventBrite is meant for business which means you can do business on their site. You can sell tickets which attendees pay for using their credit card, Paypal, or Google checkout. EventBrite makes money by taking a portion of the ticket sales. They only charge you for your event if you have tickets that are not free. For example, I don’t have a rock band but if I did, this would be a cool way to invite all my friends and get them to pay for the tickets to my show.

All of these features (except perhaps tickets) are for people who will be attending the event. What about features for the organizers? It seems they’re good at that too. While Evite seems well suited to hosting parties with a few friends with their tools like ‘drink calculator’, ‘budget estimator’ and ‘party checklist’, EventBrite has attendee registration, design and print name badges, discount codes for tickets, donations (charities pay fewer EventBrite fees too), importing contacts, and tons of email reminder features. Anyone who has hosted an event, even with the closest of friends, knows that one of the primary concerns is the flake rate. By having automatic reminders and allowing attendees to automatically add to their calendars, EventBrite deals with a big concern I normally have when I’m hosting an event.

Check it out and next time you’re having drinks at your place, give it a try and report back to JAA with your thoughts.

~Eric Hopkins II is a reformed geek from Trinidad and Tobago who loves technology but doesn’t have the free time to keep up-to-date anymore. He’s passionate about politics and the prospect of it making a real difference in people’s lives. He spent two months in Pennsylvania volunteering in the 2008 presidential campaign.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 9:46 am and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

We would love to hear what you have to say! You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.