Hey busy event organizers!

Over the past months we have been receiving lots of hints and concrete request for new features for our online event registration platform. We are happy to see so much interaction, and we kindly ask you to continue this interaction by proposing even more features, or by voting for features proposed by other Fikket users.

So what have you been asking for the last months?

Copy event

Repeating the same or a similar event multiple times? You can now clone an event by clicking “Copy”. Your event will be duplicated, including event description, title, map, tickets and prices, data collection fields, discount codes and ticket confirmation mail. This will save you a lot of time when organizing lots of similar events.

Off-line payment instructions

If you want to accept off-line payments (at door, bank transfer,…) you can now specify clear and bold payment instructions to your attendees. Those payment instructions will be sent together with the ticket confirmation mail.

Extra booking fee for online/offline payments.

Ever wanted to stimulate your attendees to pay online because in order to collect money upfront? You can now do so by playing with different booking fees for online and/or offline payments. Thanks to the booking fee, an online payment will be cheaper or more expensive than an offline payment. Reasons why it could be interesting for you to stimulate to pay online, is that you don’t have any administration work anymore for payment collection. Reasons why it could be interesting for you to stimulate offline payments is that you will not have to pay the credit card commission.

Export to CSV

Export and download your attendee list to CSV, in order to play around with it in Excel, Google Docs, or any other spreadsheet: print named badges, sort and filter or send it as an email attachment to your team.

You have a proposal for any other features? Let us know – your opinion counts!

Last months, we have been pitching at multiple locations, and we have been captured as well on video. Here two of those video’s. I don’t like at all to see myself on video, but OK, so it be. Those videos will in any case let you understand better who Fikket is and what Fikket does.

Video recorded after the Betagroup
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtHpWegSB9s
This video was recorded after our Pitch for more or less 400 people at the Betagroup

Pitching at the Microsoft Boostcamp
http://becom.be/Trainance/Fikket/index.html
What is nice about this video, is that you can switch between the presenter and the slides. This makes it easy for you to see a close up of the presenter, or a close up of the slides. I advice you to do the last .

People like to be treated “special”. To receive something exclusive. You can give your attendees for your next event something special, by offering early bird prices.

Early bird tickets are tickets with a lower price. They are typically valid only till a specific date. This creates an urgency or a need to buy them right here, right now. People that are still in doubt wheter to attend or not might decide to buy their ticket if they see that there are early bird prices. Since after this specific date, they will have to pay more for the same ticket!

How to do this with Fikket?

1 – Create a new ticket type called for example EARLY BIRD

2 – When the early bird period is over, delete the ticket type.

Did you expect more complexity? Sorry folks…

We love to interact with our users, partners and the world. So please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, whatever is the reason. For example: you have a proposal for a new feature, you have a question about Fikket, you want to know who we are, you want to meet us. There are different ways to get in touch:

Via our email info[at]fikket.com

Via telephone on the number +32 472 85 35 17

Via skype: our account is “fikket”

Via twitter: just tweet us via @fikket and we’ll tweet you back

Via facebook: become our friend on www.facebook.com/fikket

Via uservoice: any features or suggestion to improve our software can be proposed here: uservoice.fikket.com

…or just leave a comment on this blog.

When people book their tickets, they will get an email with their ticket. This is how such a ticket looks. There are two important parts: (a) is the code, and (b) is the payment method.

The payment method tells you if the ticket has been paid ONLINE (with any credit card or with PayPal) or if the ticket OFFLINE (this is under your own control, for example at entrance).

You, as an organisor, are able to get per event a full participant list, including all unique codes and payment methods. This is an extract of such a participant list:

So what do you do at entrance? There are two possibilities:

1. A manual check. You print the list of participants, and manually you check the tickets against the list.
   - If the code is not in the list, then the ticket is not valid.
   - If the code is in the list, and the payment method is OFFLINE, then the organisor (you!) has to ensure that the ticket is paid. This can be at entrance, but also via invoice after the event took place
   - If the code is in the list, and the payment method is ONLINE, then all is OK. The person can enter. Don’t forget to indicate that this code is already used, so that another person with the same code can not enter!
2. A box office scanner software:
   A simple USB scanner connected to your laptop can do the same checks as the one described above, but completely automated. There are many softwares out there that can do this job for you. Often you can buy them together with a USB scanner. In the meantime, at Fikket, we are working ourself on a little piece of software that will be made available to you through the Fikket website. Please send us an email if you would like some more information on this.

…and more!

We got lots of requests from different users to implement multi currency functionality, so they could sell out their next event online in dollars, euro’s, yen, or one of those many other currencies. And guess what? Indeed, it’s now possible to sell out your next seminar, training, workshop, theater or festival in one of those currencies:

• Canadian Dollars
• Euros
• British Pounds
• U.S. Dollars
• Yen
• Australian Dollars
• New Zealand Dollars
• Swiss Francs
• Hong Kong Dollars
• Singapore Dollars
• Swedish Kroner
• Danish Kroner
• Polish Zloty
• Norwegian Kroner
• Hungarian Forints
• Czech Koruny
• Israeli Shekels
• Mexican Pesos
• Brazilian Real (only for Brazilian users)
• Malaysian Ringgits (only for Malaysian users)
• Philippine Pesos
• Taiwan New Dollars
• Thai Baht

If there are other features that would help you further, please do not hesitate to post it as a comment here, or via Uservoice.

Events are per definition social. People attend events to meet other people.

Knowing this, we recently launched our new functionality “who’s attending?“. As an organizer, you can indicate whether you want to show on your event registration page the list of attendees in public. You also can choose to show other data about attendees. You can see an example of a public attendee list on this event: http://fikket.be/betagroup/event/46

Is this big deal? Yes it is! Attendees are very picky about who else is coming. They will sign up much more easy if they see a lot of friends or connections that already subscribed.

How to use it? Log in with your Fikket account, go do my events, edit an event and at the bottom right you can choose to show or not show the public attendee list.

What do you think about this functionality? Are there other functionalities that you would add?

With Fikket you can take your ticket sales for your next event online. That way, you can save a lot of administration time for your next event, seminar, course workshop or theater. Attendees can pay with PayPal or any credit card.

In order to collect your money online, you have two possibilities:

1. You want to have the money instantly on your account. For this you need a PayPal account.
2. You don’t want to set up a PayPal account? Then you will receive the money from the ticket sales at the end of each month. You provide us with your bank account number in your Fikket settings, and we transfer you at the end of each month the money.

Setting up a PayPal account is quick and easy, and we want to share with you how to do so.

Step 1

Go do www.paypal.com

Step 2

Click on “sign up”

Step 3

Choose the right account type “Premier” or “Business”. Those are the only accounts that will allow you to take credit card payments as well. If you already have a PayPal account, you can opt to upgrade as well.

Step 4

Fill in all data.

Step 5

PayPal will send you an activation mail. Don’t forget to click this link. Without first activating, you will not be able to take in online Payments via credit card.

Step 6

Log on to www.fikket.com, go to “my account” and provide your PayPal account. This is the email address that you used to sign up for PayPal.

You are done! As from now, all the ticket sales money will be directly put on your PayPal account.

After an intensive period of user testing, fine tuning, beta accounts, feedback, hard work with a lot of passion, we can proudly present you the brand new version of Fikket.

What is new?

1. Organizers, you can easily customize your own overview page of your upcoming seminars, workshops, theaters, courses, info sessions or events. Here a demo of how such an overview page looks like.
2. You can manage discount codes. Those discount codes can be distributed to potential attendees (via email, …), who can use them during the booking process. That way they’ll benefit some discount, and you can reward your best attendees, members, special guests and more.
3. You can brand the ticket confirmation mail. That way you can for example send special instructions or extra information together with the tickets.
4. You choose which data you collect from your attendees. You want to know their preferred sport, invoice number or age? Just define additional registration fields, indicate if mandatory or not, and you’ll collect the data that you need to collect.
5. Our tool is simplified where needed. This makes it even more easy to bring your next event online in only a few minutes. Even grandma’s should feel comfortable using Fikket

Here an overview of all our functionalities.

Thanks again to all our testers, first customers, supporters and FFF’s (family, fools and friends).

Online event management means “publishing, promoting, managing, and selling out your event online”. Publishing your event means putting all information about your event online. Online promotion means the use of digital communications channels like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or E-mail to promote your event. Selling out your event online means attendees can pay their tickets online. Most often, tickets are sent by E-mail. Online event management has many advantages. We list 9 of them:

1. Less printing costs

Attendees print their tickets at home, each with a unique code and barcode. This means you don’t need to design and print tickets yourself.

2. Less administration

Traditional registration often happens by phone, mail, or fax. You need someone to answer the phones, read the emails, or process the faxes. Also, all registrations need to be collected into one central file, to prevent over bookings. A lot of things can go wrong during these administration processes: misunderstandings on the phone, faxes that are not readable, …Online ticket sales resolves these problems and gives organizers more time to spend on other useful activities. As organizing events generally takes a lot of time, these time savings can be very useful.

3. No over bookings

Online event management software often allows you to manage the capacity of your event. This can prevent you from selling more tickets than places are available. Once full capacity is reached, it is simply no longer possible to buy tickets online. Managing capacity without online tickets sales is often more difficult: you need to bring together all sales (by phone, fax, mail, etc.) constantly. You need to communicate that the event is booked …With online event management software, you can raise capacity whenever you want.

4. Accurate reporting

How many tickets did you sell exactly? How much revenues were created? Reality shows that the answers are not always straightforward. Online event management software often contains standard reports to deal with these issues (e.g. tickets sold, revenues, payment methods, attendee information, etc). Reports can be downloaded in Excel or other software.

5. Collect online payments immediately

You know how it goes: attendees call for ticket reservations, the tickets are held aside, and then they don’t show up! With online tickets sales you can force your attendees to pay online. This enables you to collect the money immediately and be sure that attendees will show up. You no longer need to monitor all transactions; the computer does it for you.

6. Professional image

Nowadays, flight tickets are no longer booked by phone. Customers simply expect airline companies to have an online booking system. It is a necessary tool to stay in business. The same evolution is to be expected for theaters, trainings, seminars, concerts, sports events, etc. An organization with online tickets sales and promotion creates a young, dynamic, and professional image.

7. You get a second chance (and a third, fourth …)

Once your tickets are printed, you can no longer change the price. Once your 500 folders or posters are printed, you can no longer correct possible mistakes. Online, however, nothing is definitive. You can, at any time, change prices, augment capacity, correct spelling errors, change the address, etc. Furthermore you collect the email addresses of all attendees via the online ticket sales, so you can contact them with important changes.

8. No need to be a web designer or programmer

Online event management software is clear and simple, meaning that you can put your event online and set up your sell out page in a couple of minutes. You can start promoting your event via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or email. All of this without programming one line of code. Also, online event management systems often provide the option to embed the software into your own website. The software is easy to use for everyone!

9. Online viral marketing

Compared to the classical promotion methods (e.g. posters on the street), online promotions have lots of advantages. Viral marketing is the effect of spreading your site like a virus on the internet; people tell each other online to come to your event. This kind of marketing can spread very fast! Read the following article on viral marketing for events and how it works.

What are the advantages of online event management according to you?