Teachers and marketing staff at schools often double as event planners. From sports presentation nights, to school musicals and parent evenings, there’s a lot that goes on at secondary colleges after the final bell rings.
When juggling students, parents, and multiple priorities, event organisation can be very time consuming — but it doesn’t need to be. New technology is making it easier than ever for events to run smoothly, helping school event planners to do more in less time.
For an insider’s perspective, we spoke to the Marketing & Communications Manager for Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar, Kushla Smith, to find out her top five free Eventbrite tools for managing secondary school events.
Event ticketing doesn’t need to eat into your school budget. Eventbrite is free to use for free events and more affordable than ever for paid events with our brand new schools offer. View the special offer for schools here.
1. Reserved Seating
School musicals and events held off-site often require a detailed seating plan or even reserved seating. Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar use the Reserved Seating tool in Eventbrite to help plan their concert events more efficiently.
“The reserved seating functionality is fantastic for venues that have seating numbers. We have a concert event that is held in the same location each year. We set up the venue map once and can now easily replicate the same plans every year without any additional work” says Kushla. “We use reserved seating to block out seats for VIP guests and reserve space for the Year 7 students who are required to attend. Having this ready to go saves us a lot of time on future events.”
2. Guest lists
When managing free events, it’s easy to overlook online ticketing as a helpful event management tool. By using online ticketing to manage free school events, Strathcona have been able to access all the information they need on guest lists, rather than managing things in manual spreadsheets or having to guess attendee numbers. Kushla finds the guest list features in Eventbrite particularly useful when she needs to consult with teachers and year level coordinators.
“It’s been extremely useful to be able to break down guest lists for teachers and year level coordinators” says Kushla. “For example, when we have a sporting awards ceremony, I can provide our Sports Coordinator a breakdown of the list to ensure that the parents of award recipients will be attending on the night. If they haven’t secured a ticket yet, they can be called to make sure they don’t miss out on their child’s special moment” she explains.
If you’re running a paid event, you don’t need to worry about ticketing fees when using Eventbrite. Simply select the option to pass on fees to attendees as part of the ticket price. Learn more here.
Recommended Download: Event Ticketing 101: A Guide for Secondary Schools
3. Custom questions
The best way to find out what your attendees really want is to ask! Eventbrite’s custom questions feature is a great way to get event attendee information upfront, helping you plan a better event and even improve your marketing results in future. Strathcona uses custom questions in the ticket checkout process to determine things like dietary requirements, and also what association attendees have with the school. This allows them to better determine who to target for public events. Kushla explains “Being able to ask custom questions helps our marketing department determine why people have chosen to attend our events. This is extremely helpful in identifying audience segments such as parents and alumni.”
4. Discount and access codes
Secondary school events have a large number of important stakeholders such as parents, alumni, teachers, investors, and VIP guests. When it comes to paid events, you may not want everyone to pay the same price, offering discounts to staff or free tickets to lure VIP guests.
Using discount and access codes makes this much easier to manage. By providing a special code to different groups, all of these stakeholders can use the same event page while accessing their own ticket pricing. “From staff discounts to VIP guests and ticket giveaways, the access code functionality allows us to manage different groups within the same event” says Kushla.
5. Tracking links
Do you know what is driving the most ticket registrations for your school’s event? Strathcona recommends using tracking links to find out. Kushla explains “Tracking links allows us to see how many tickets have been booked from each platform or marketing channel, which is a huge help in determining how effective our event marketing programs are.”
Switching to Eventbrite has helped Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar organise events more efficiently, while also representing their school brand in the best light. “It’s very user-friendly and modern” says Kushla. “Our events look so much better on Eventbrite, which is really important to our brand and school image. We can do a lot more with the design and use the same image across all platforms (i.e. event page school newsletter, social media, etc.) to ensure consistency when we promote our events. Using the Eventbrite widget, people don’t even need to leave our website to book into an event, it’s all embedded within our own site.”
Getting started
Looking for a modern online ticketing platform to power your school’s next event? Eventbrite’s easy-to-use ticketing solution is now more affordable than ever. Find out more about Eventbrite’s special offer for schools here.
Want to discuss the offer with one of our event experts? Give us a at 1800 820 172 in Australia, or 0800 448 422 in New Zealand.
