[group-organizers] RSVPs

[Peter Farrell]

We had virtually no complaints when we did our Data^3 event at Target last
March...accept one. We had a guy that has a startup ask for a free ticket.
We declined as his attendance rate was 1/19 events. He eventually did
reserve a spot and.... Showed up.

Anyways for limited space venues like Target Commons, we felt it was
important to fill the space but not exceed the fire marshal room limits of
250. They were weary of setting the limit higher because of no shows plus
we asked which box lunch they wanted. We had the correct number of GF, veg
and vegan special boxes for the first time!

The Target event planning crew (they have dedicated staff for the Commons)
thought the reservation deposit was a great idea and had started to do that
for their special events at the Skyway Software Symposium they run.

We just did a special event with a speaker from Twitter that was in town
and didn't use a reserve a spot process... We planned on 30-35% no shows
but it was in excess of almost 60%. I was a bit embarrassed because our
sponsor bought lots of food and the speaker from Twitter made extra effort
to come.

I feel the key is to word it correctly by not calling it a ticket but
reserve your spot. Processing refunds is pretty easy with EventBrite (but
could be easier). So this is a tool in our tool case but not one we use at
our monthly meetings.

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 3:00 PM, Don Sheu <dinaldo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey folks, wondering what approaches folks have to encouraging accurate
> RSVPs for events.
>
> Some of PuPPy's organizers want to charge a fee of $5 over Eventbrite.
> Amount would be refunded on check-in.
>
> Welcome everybody's thoughts and experience on this one.

What problem are you trying to solve by making people pay, and how
large is the data set of inaccurate RSVPs to accurate attendance for
the group? I've found between 60-70% attendance to be the rate with
the handful of things I've organized, other organizers I've talked to
were roughly in that range, and 0.65 happens to be the number Ned
settled on in pizza.py. What have you in seen in that group?
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