Yesterday we released Events, Memberships and the new UI. This is the general release of these new features and almost all Akubo accounts have already been upgraded.
In this post we give an overview of the Events feature and how you can use it to manage and promote your events. The idea behind the Events feature is to not only promote your events and manage attendance, payment and donation information (all in your database) — but it is also an easy way to grow and update your database.
The Events feature is accessible from the main page of Akubo. On the toolbar, you’ll see an icon called Events & Memberships.
The first page that opens is where you would see a listing of your Events, and a button for Creating your Event.
You can create free or paid events — we support payment options such as paypal, authorize.net and stripe, and you can also offer payment options by check or pay at the event. Besides payment information, we also allow you to collect other information besides just name and contact information such as what is your handicap (for golf events), or do you have a food preference (for choosing between vegetarian or non-vegetarian dinner selections).
After creating your event, a public page is created for your event — you can share this public page on your Facebook and Twitter pages, and also link to it from your website or your email announcements.
The manage guests page shows who have registered for your event and includes payment and registration information. You can also easily mark a guest as attended (checked-in) so you can review attendance and event registration.
Although we primarily designed this as an online event registration tool, we added an option to register manually so if you have guests who want to register by phone, or mail in their registration, you can easily add their registration to your Akubo events.
You can also export your registration list to Excel if you want a printed paper copy to use at the ticket table at your event.
When you’re ready to close out registration (event is full, or it’s the day of the event and you want to stop accepting registrations), you can specify the date for closing out event registration or manually close it out from the Manage Guests page.
We hope this feature becomes one of the many ways you can use to connect to your contacts. Please send us feedback and suggestions so we can make this the best event management tool for you. And if you’re curious what else the Akubo team is up to, please check out our other software products — Clearbugs (bug tracking software for solo and small team developers), Esturya (learning and communication apps), and ngoPH (a resource for Philippine NGOs).