I have not done a product review before, but I think I'll start off with our event management system. Eventbrite is the system we use at NewPath to advertise our events to our mailing list of 500+ folks. I must admit, they have gone a long way from the initial email exchange I had with one of their founders, Julia. I wanted an evite replacement, and, finally after 2 years I think they've satisfied all my event management needs, and more.
I found the system in April 2006 when I was registering for another event that was using Mollyguard, the old name for Eventbrite. Here's the email I sent to Dan Pink when I found this system:
from Alex Sirota <[email protected]>
to date subject mailed-by
Watch these guys eat Evite's lunch... A web 2.0 version of evite is MUCH needed for folks like me... :)
The system has evolved into a fully capable event management system. Here's what I particularly like about Eventbrite.
1. Very quick and easy UI to setup and run an event, without ads.
2. Integrates with PayPal very cleanly with lots of ticketing options (free, complementary, etc).
3. Lots of customization options including advertising your event on their portal, your own website and look & feel options.
4. Most importantly, the list management features allow you to easily view who's opened, clicked, ignored, registered, not registered for your event. You can then resent invites to subsets of the invites. And best of all, if folks register for your event off the invite list you can continue to put them into your main invitation list. This is key to growing the invitation lists. Multiple lists are supported of course.
Using a system like Eventbrite guarantees that you will save time and effort from tracking who's coming to what, who's paid and who has not. You can do analysis on a longer term basis to find out who comes to your events regularly.
I give it 5 out of 5 Alex's.
ps. If you sign up with the NewPath affiliate link we'll get a little kick back from EventBrite, and you'll get some karma points. Go ahead -- try it.