Take the stress out of organising your golf event and sell tickets online

We’re all fired up with enthusiasm and renewed interest in our golf game after last week’s fantastic win by Graeme McDowell – the first European to take the coveted trophy since 1970. What an achievement and great day for the Northern Irish man.

Over the next few months most of you are probably going to have busy playing schedules: more of you will be running golf tournaments and competitions, planning corporate and golf society outings. Deliver a successful golf outing and you can be a winner too!

Whether your clients golf on a single digit handicap or just play for pleasure EventElephant, the online event registration system, is here to help you make your golfing events run smoothly and professionally.

EventElephant automates all the essential tasks to help you market and promote your golf event. You can:

• Create a contact database and event contact list.
• Sell tickets online. We know this will increase your ticket sales by at least 20%.
• Set up several ticket categories, including concessions and promotional offers.
• Send promotional emails about your event and manage the responses, attendee sign-up and create name badges.

All that will give you your albatross!

Here are a few tips to running a winning golf society event.

• If it’s a fundraiser get it registered on the website of the charity / charities you are supporting.
• Send out invites early and ensure you collect your funds through EventElephant to avoid cancellations. EventElephant lets you send email invitations for your events straight to your target audience.
• Social networking sites are great for letting lots of people know about your event. It’s easy and cost effective. Just log on to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and send your url to your contacts. With EventElephant’s new Facebook Application, as the event organiser you can automatically and quickly upload details of your event to your Facebook page, getting notice of your event in front of your own friends. Ask your contact list to spread the word and upload to their social networking sites.
  
• Send out reminders 3 days in advance with start times: ask attendees to arrive 30 minutes early to allow time for players to get introduced and find their team members. EventElephant’s email functionality allows you to send an email to everybody who is registered and or invited.
• Remind people to advise you if they’re not available to play so you can reallocate places and reorganise teams.
• If networking is important to the event make sure you get permission from attendees to circulate the attendee list in advance of the event.
• Advise people of the club’s dress code. You can do this in your invitation or reminder. You can also include a section on your EventElephant website on dress code and any other club rules.
• Give clear instructions to all players when they arrive: facilitate introductions to get players quickly sorted into their teams.
• Ensure the teeing off times are kept to schedule. Try booking tee times 4 months in advance to secure the date you want. Business societies usually prefer to get tee times from 1.30pm onwards.

Get Started today: learn more and see what other golf event organisers have done: click here.

“We are running our 6 golf events on EventElephant’s online event registration software. It has made life so much easier for our society golf organisers. We have a great looking website with all the information of the tournaments. We can email our members directly and people can sign up to our mailing list. In fact, we use EventElephant’s registration system as the website for the IFSC Golfing Society. It’s a tremendous resource and so cost effective”. Honorary Secretary, IFSC golf society.

Now go for that hole in one – Eventelephant online event registration software. It’s free to give it a go – just click here.

Balancing a laid back atmosphere while delivering a well run music festival

Life Festival now has it all: an efficiently managed, fun festival, trouble free for both organisers and attendees, providing a personable experience to free spirited aficionados who attended from all around the world for a weekend of music, arts, dance, and culture in Belvedere House Park, Westmeath, Ireland during the June bank holiday weekend 2010.

Smaller than Electric Picnic and Oxegen with a maximum capacity of 5,000, Life Festival is famed for its laid back, relaxed atmosphere and good time crowd. It’s chilled out character and alternative music is what sets it apart for the attendees. Behind the scenes, EventElephant delivers an online event registration system and tools that guarantee success for the event organisers and ensures the festival goers enjoy the music.


This year there were many firsts for EventElephant and Life. It was our first collaboration. Previously, Life Festival used TicketMaster as its booking engine. With EventElephant, Life Festival retains control of the database. This is a great advantage for festival and event organisers. They retain control and have a contact list to market and promote their events in future years.

As well as providing EventElephant’s usual service of tracking sales, creating reports & managing bookings from the one place we introduced our new barcode scanning and verification application which allows the organisers to scan each printed ticket on entry using a barcode scanner.

We sent our “Festivals” man Andy Noonan along to oversee its introduction.
“With a venue like this it is important to control the attendees entering and the ones who shouldn’t be. Entry at the gate was efficient and quick. We caught the few trying to pass off duplicate tickets. Our new system worked without a glitch, ” said Andy.

And, it was good for the attendees too. We talked to Lifer, Eimear Staunton and an event organiser herself, now at her fourth Life Festival. She reckoned this year was her best Life experience yet.
“I loved the venue this year. Good vibes, great music and cool people. The scanner is a great idea, lots of people do use fake tickets and if it helps Life to come back bigger and better next year then that’s even better”

It’s hard to keep track of a large crowd, but with EventElephant’s new barcode scanning and verification application it’s simple.

How It Works
As well as providing EventElephant’s usual service of online ticket registration and payment, distribution and promotion, our new application allows the organisers to scan each printed ticket on entry using a barcode scanner.

To get started you need to:
1. Download the Scanning Application.
2. Purchase a 2D Barcode Scanner.
3. Download the Attendee List and upload it to the Scanning Application.

The organisers upload their attendee list into the barcode scanner and EventElephant emails a pdf ticket to the customer containing the bar code which they can print and bring to the event. Each ticket includes a unique barcode which identifies the ticket. When the ticket is presented for admittance to the festival or show, the barcode is scanned to check validity and a match to the customer database. After the event, the event organiser can upload the attendee numbers and details back into the system for next year’s promotional activities, for instance. It’s that simple!
The Benefits

• Prevents ticket forgery
• Keeps a record of attendees
• Makes the work of the box office simpler
• Easier to manage large numbers
• Record of who has attended and who has not
• Reduced costs through not having to print and post tickets

And the outcome? Easy event planning! Check it out here.

Event Elephant is delighted to be involved with "Europe’s best underground electronic festival" in its fifth and greatest year to date.

" We are glad we used Eventelephant as our management and ticketing system for Life Festival 2010. Having an EventElephant representative on site helped the festival to go smoothly. The Barcode scanning system worked perfectly making the entry to the event really quick for punters and easy for the box-office staff." Fernando T. Martin, Life Festival Director.

RISING TO THE CHALLENGE OF SECURING SPONSORSHIP FOR EVENT PLANNING IN THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CLIMATE

The costs of running an event can be significant. Selling tickets online (attendee fees) may not be enough to ensure success and achievement of your financial goals. Securing sponsorship for your event may be a requirement. Professional event organizers will be well versed in the steps to securing suitable sponsors and sponsorship. New event organizers may find it daunting the first time round. All event organizers are challenged in the current climate to secure new sponsors and or retain existing sponsors. But, this is still possible. How? Start early!

The process commences at least a year in advance. Once you have your sponsorship guaranteed you have secured the financial status of the event. This in turn gives you the option of discounting attendee fees or even making the event free to some/all attendees. You can also look at offering a discounted fee for early bird registration, always a great help in managing the significant cashflow issues around event management.

First, as an event organizer, you need to do your homework on your targeted sponsors.

What are their company goals and objectives?
Are your conference / event attendees their target audience and buyers?

To secure sponsorship with any organisation, you need to demonstrate how they can reach their target audience through your event. Have a look at their competition and what they are doing: can you help them establish a meaningful difference through your event, for instance?

Be clear about the benefits. Before you meet them, identify where they will get coverage: on your website, in your newsletters, emails about the event to your database, in the lead up to the event. Placement of their banners at the conference or event itself. Think about a brochure / event booklet and where your sponsors can get mention. Booklets can be a great way of attracting additional funding, for instance, if you are running a charity ball. What about any media activities you are conducting? Can mention of your key sponsors be incorporated?

Professional event organizers need to have an understanding of their sponsors’ business and maintain ongoing good working relationships with their sponsors. Remember that a race isn’t won at the beginning or the end, it’s what you do along the way that counts. And never under-estimate the value of post event follow up meetings and discussions to ascertain what you can improve on/do differently the next time out. Don’t take the money and run. Stay in touch.

If we can help, get in touch: info@eventelephant.com

If you have any wining tips that you wish to share then do get in touch!

Thanks to Marie at Event Management International for her contribution.

The highs and lows of being an event organiser

Eamon O’Brien, EventElephant’s CEO, regaled his listeners at Bizcamp Dublin recently, with his story of how EventElephant came about.


“Who here has organised a large event for business?” Eamon asked his audience. “Did you enjoy the experience, was it a success for your attendees?” The responses were typical: “We struggled keeping track of all the event information”: “Not having an online booking engine or a means of taking payment online seriously impacted our sales”. Eamon knew the story well. Prior to EventElephant he ran his own successful event management company, Event Management International . “Nine years of frustration where I aged significantly” is how Eamon described event management without proper tools.
It all started back in May 2006 and “The Heineken Cup Final Rugby Tour from Heaven (and from Hell).... Munster vs ‘Le French’ from Biarritz – Heineken Cup Final”. (We like our rugby at EventElephant). “I volunteered for the job of event managing the gig”.

Case Study: The Bright Idea (from hell)
The job : Cardiff - Utter Munster Mania / Madness

• 60 adults & 60 kids; 5 hotels
• 2 buses (both ended up dented... driver error!!)
• 2 match (Bective minis vs. Ynysybwl !!)... Up the narrow street of the valleys
• The framed jersey (how to ensure that you are always welcome back!)
• 120 tickets from ERC
• No system, no proper records, no payments, cheques everywhere, some early, some lost
• No system structure...... 3 weeks work – 3 years older!

The outcome

• “It didn’t win me business but.....
• It made me alot of friends and admirers (no other gom (read crazy person) would have taken it on, but today it lives in the memories of 100 people so if I am honest (and it helped that we won) I got a huge buzz out of it”
• “Made me think there HAD to be a better way of doing this.”
• “Here comes EventElephant”

Now we are winning awards for our innovative online event booking technology and we are making event planners lives easier, as confirmed recently by Andy Carr, director of the Sunset Music Group, and the Sunset Music Festival 2010 explains: “We were searching around for a system that could handle the complexities of festival ticket registrations. We needed a system that could monitor and track daily tickets sales and at the same time receive regular income direct into our bank account so we could keep control over the event finances. We are now seeing record ticket sales.” Published in a recent article in Stand Out magazine: (see page 39).
It’s been a long way from Cardiff to here but a great journey so far”

“Event technology is in vogue"

The June edition of Stand Out magazine (see page 39) looks at the impact of technology on event organisers and planners. As a leading provider of online event registration technology, Stand Out sought the views of EventElephant.



“At some point every event organiser will have no choice but to join the online revolution. Not doing so is increasing the risk of becoming uncompetitive, of creating attendee dissatisfaction and of rapidly eroding event margins.”
With online payment technology an event planner can boost revenue. EventElephant research suggests on average event organisers report a 20 per cent increase in attendee numbers when they offer an online registration and payment facility. Attendees are much more likely to take action and to register and pay straight away if they are presented with just an online option. They are more likely to postpone their decision to sign up if they have to confirm and pay by phone or post.
We recently helped the organisers of Sunset Festival 2010. Andy Carr, director of the Sunset Music Group, explains: “We were searching around for a system that could handle the complexities of festival ticket registrations. We needed a system that could monitor and track daily tickets sales and at the same time receive regular income direct into our bank account so we could keep control over the event finances. We are now seeing record ticket sales.” The reality for event organisers is that fully embracing web technology is no longer an option – it is an urgent requirement. Sell your tickets online now. Read the rest of Stand Out’s article here: (see page 39)