Raise your hand if you haven’t used Eventbrite before. Even though I can’t see your hands, I have a gut feeling that there are very few raised. Eventbrite is the most widely used ticketing platform on the web. Nearly 60,000 organizers use Eventbrite each month for event ticketing, clocking in at over 200 million tickets.
Eventbrite is an ideal solution for nonprofits – free events are completely free, and paid events have a reduced service fee. The event pages are slick, it has enough market penetration that the public has heard of it, and its mobile solution is top notch.
So why do nonprofit organizations with Salesforce shy away from it?
The Salesforce integration app – built in a partnership of Eventbrite and Groundwire has a lukewarm reception. Last updated in 2012, the free app lives on Github begging for someone to make it awesome. Although the foundation is good, the biggest complaint is that the sync is manual – events are created in Eventbrite and then the user must initiate the sync to bring over the event as a campaign and the attendees as campaign members. That means your org is living in two different systems – not exactly ideal for a nonprofit with limited resources.
Here’s four ways that the integration can be made more awesome:
1.) Auto-syncing between Eventbrite and Salesforce: I think a lot of the grief could be solved by making the sync automatic (real-time) or semi-automatic (on a nightly basis). This would keep users in one system and help teams to compare campaigns in real time.
2.) Eventbrite event creation within Salesforce: This would help keep the users in one system, which is very important for nonprofits. I would recommend a baseline integration to begin with that could be expanded upon: event name, date and time, location, and ticket options (free, paid, donation, etc) are a great start, and anything additional could be handled by the Eventbrite expert in the office.
3.) Provide access to printed materials from Salesforce: Name badges, check-in lists – all of these great printed materials are what take an event from good to great. A standard PDF template for both should live within Salesforce that could be accessed by a button on the Campaign record.
4.) Bring in the analytics!: A Canvas integration to the Salesforce instance could bring in the charts such as page views and attendee geography – and would make the campaign far more useful.
Looking for a challenge? Head on over to Github and make it happen! I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
