i am trying to solve the problem of too much manual work with event registration, for example, i think sending confirmation emails individually to people registered in google forms its un-acceptable today. this is not sustainable in then long term and will burn us all.
confirmation emails are automated. we can customize the text of those emails: address etc.
we can embed all the list of upcoming events in our website (if we have a wordpress homepage) so we dont need to change the date of our current website in 3 languages every time there is a new event. = every time there is a new event in luma, the website gets automatically updated.
if you have some time please test the link and share your thoughts. thanks
thanks joannes for bringing this up. i like comparison of tools is pertinent in this thread.
personally i think the choice is between luma and eventbrite. luma is eventbrite but improved. it’s made 15 years later and just better for users and organizers. I have used eventbrite for longtime and it works. it could be an option for us for selling free tickets. but i have the impression that luma is lighter with extremely swift user experience as a buyer of tickets. and it gives us some more features than eventbrite as event organizes like html embedding and form customization.
meetup is more for building communities but we are looking here for ticket selling tool so is not the same thing. and they have a bad reputation these days. people are leaving meetup if you are a bit more tech savy.
a single page with all the upcoming events.
luma offers just what we need. like this examplethis makes us save tons of time. we dont need to update our website, we dont need to encode our newsletter again with events. this page is portable via html embed= you embed the html in the newsletter. it flyes wherever you want to put it. and we dont need to send manually emails … this is an urgent thing and is @reef-external and @reef-it competence. so i am up for moving this asap
Until the debacle of the last couple of weeks this was all working perfectly well. I therefore disagree that this is urgent, and I would be grateful if everybody who is affected by this gets consulted on this, as it is agreed in our governance methods.
As somebody who has actually done the job, I can also confirm that updating the website doesn’t take tons of time.
Just to confirm: today I timed it. Updating the website in the three languages took me less than 5 minutes. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken would be my recommendation on this one.
i had a conversation with @joannes he thinks that priority right now is to clarify who is doing what and some kind of team external manual.
i said and he agreed that it would be nice to have a single document that stays as the source of truth: a table where you can see upcoming events, dates, places, links to subscribe etc.
right now we have a lot of google forms subscriptions links scattered all over the place and this creates confusion.
sending confirmation emais after subscription is team recruitment and onboarding task. since is not my team i am not going to get on it. but i still think that sending emails one by one to all participants is really not ok and should be easily automated. @reef-recruitment ping me if you want to think about a solution on this. just want to help
you are fast! it takes at least 10min to me. but it’s not only the website. you also need to rewrite it again in the newsletter and this risk also to make mistakes: the date, the link, the place…
my solution is: draft once (the single source of truth) update everywhere (web, newsletter).
We currently do not have a Wordpress site, mostly. Our site runs on the Webkit, because that makes it super easy to update for people who use the Edgeryders forum. However, the landing page is indeed a Wordpress instance.
Agree with Manuel on Eventbrite, whose main added value is that it lets you sell tickets.
Meetup also not a great idea, because it forces people to create an account to attend an event. On the other hand, having also a Meetup group means that people who are on Meetup now need to register twice… unless we tell them that is not necessary, and we count registrations as those coming from the forms (Luma) + those coming from Meetup (which is against Manuel’s automation idea).
@reef-recruitment@mieke i tested a zapier integration and seems to work with my accounts. every time there is a new registration in google forms, zapier sends an automated email to the person registered, google this for more info “send outbound emails for new google form responses with zapier”
let me know if you need help and/or want to test it with your forms, cheers
i have created an automation on the form for the next event on the 27 may 2025. feel free to give it a try as a user to see if it works for you. it’s already in production @reef-recruitment
I’m curious about what data it will provide us about the registrations, like how they learned about The Reef, and in what format. Is it possible to give me access rights to the backstage?
with this we keep using google forms. the data is on the same place as usual= google forms. this Zapier trick is just a bridge: every time someone registers to the google form it “taps on the shoulder” of gmail and sends an automated email.
