Jodie McLean 0:04
Hey, I'm Jody Event Manager, business owner, educator and podcast host. I'm an introverted homebody want to be wine master. And I truly believe in the power of events to inspire delight and ignite human potential. Every week, I take you backstage into the wonderful world of business events, and give you the insider scoop on how to take your events to the next level. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional custodians of the lands where we live, learn and listen. Let's get into it. Hello, hello, and welcome to episode 12 of the events Insider PodCast. And welcome to August, gosh, it is absolutely crunch time for events. If you plan events, I find, you know, September October, it's always busy as we emerge from winter and we, you know, start to see nice summery events again. So we're gearing up for that, then you've got the busyness of the end of year events in November, December. You know, I'm definitely getting inquiries at the moment for Christmas parties and long lunches and all those fun things. But then I find in August, we're also starting to look ahead at 2024. And mapping out, you know what the company event calendar might look like. So if you're feeling like there's a lot of event activity on the horizon, you're definitely not alone. It is that time of year. Now. Last week, we talked about how to cut through all this noise, you know whether you've got an invite only event or you need to market it wider. I shared five strategies that you can use to help increase your RSVPs your registrations and ultimately attendance at your events. So if you haven't listened to last week's episode, then definitely go back and listen to it. Because today it ties in perfectly as a follow on. So today, we are talking all about event ticketing and registration. And I'm joined by Adam McCurdy, who is the co founder of humanity x. Now if you haven't heard of humanity X, I don't know what you've been doing. But it is an event ticketing platform. And I'll let Adam share more about what it is because he will do a better job than I would. But you know, as event planners, we can put all this effort into planning an event. But if we don't have a smooth and clear RSVP process or registration process, and we don't get attendees, then it's all just a waste. So we chat about lots of small things that you should think about, but also some pretty big features that their platform offers that could really help you run your event. So let's get into it. Or Adam, welcome to the events Insider PodCast. Oh, God. So good to have you here. And thank you for agreeing to chat with me today. I'm very excited for this chat. Actually, for anyone who doesn't know, can you tell us a little bit about what humanity X
Adam McCurdie 2:48
does? Sure. Humanity x is an events ticketing platform for live events. And we believe that events ticketing should be nonprofit. And that is for the interests of event organisers, customers and the planet. And that's because of a range of reasons. One is ticketing, a bit of a notorious industry that charge billions of dollars in booking fees that everybody hates. Yep. And as a nonprofit, we can give away 100% of all profits from booking fees into funding the best children's charities and charities around the planet, here in Australia as well, to solve really challenging issues in society. And on top of that, we solve a range of accessibility issues to make live events more accessible for patrons who have a range of disabilities, that being a big blind spot, particularly for kind of small to medium sized events, as well as the larger events, obviously. Yeah, it's been credibly exciting and an amazing ride. And so we now think of given now close to $3 million away, just from booking fees to charities, and we now kind of give it away at a rate of about $3 million a year. So that's increasing very quickly as we've grown. As you know, the world of events is switching to humanities, which is super exciting.
Jodie McLean 4:09
Yeah, and I know booking fees for my clients is always a pet peeve. So we definitely try and reduce it where we can but absolutely film go to charity. I mean, that's amazing. It's such a good idea. But I actually read that you were previously an engineer. And so naturally, I was wondering how you ended up running a tech business to disrupt event, ticketing?
Adam McCurdie 4:32
Well, I guess being an engineer has made me where have really the power of software now particularly across the internet with what's called software as a service where you can download an application or just use an application on the internet. And that's everything from a ticketing platform to accounting software, you name it, and the social enterprise model where a company not rather than having shareholders, giving away all of its profits to a higher purpose that maximum charitable purpose is a fascinating business model to me and my co founder, Josh, that can make a huge impact in the world. And we weren't, we're still not seeing that taking place in software. And so then the question was what would be a really appropriate and timely industry driven by software that we can disrupt in this fashion and ticketing events, ticketing, registration platforms for live events, given the notorious booking fees, given the gouging of profit and pricing and drip feeding fees, you name it seemed like the perfect fit to offer event hosts event organisers all across the spectrum, a better piece of software, lower booking fees, and all the profits going to charity, because we have no shareholders structured the organisation intentionally as a nonprofit,
Jodie McLean 5:47
yeah, I love how much thought was behind it. And I love that you had, I guess, kind of business structure or concept first, and then kind of went, where can we actually place this, and I'm so glad that you did land in the events industry, because it made my life better. Obviously, I made the shift to humanity x A little while ago, a few years ago, and you know, strongly encourage all my clients to use it when we do need a ticketing platform. And I think, you know, in the last few years, we've definitely seen like a big shift towards I guess, more sustainable or like meaningful events and companies really thinking about how they can really think more meaningfully about the way that they run their events. How have you guys seen that kind of play out, I guess, in the uptake of your business? Because when did you start in 2016? Yeah, so how have you I guess, in the last few years seen that uptake, what's that been like?
Adam McCurdie 6:37
It's been phenomenon, it's been overwhelming. The events will, when using a more ethical or humane ticketing platform turned out to be a great fit, not just because the industry is kind of notorious for these fees. But also because as an event promoter, the ticketing platform becomes your front end interface for customers to come and receive, you know, the marketing of the events and decide whether or not they want to register. And wrapping that in a social enterprise with thoughtful distribution of profits to charities goes a long, long way. With an event organisers customers, it's, it's a no brainer, easy addition, it's not costing event organisers, any any money, because it's humanity is donating its profits to provide that added element to to their event. And interestingly, when the social enterprise models when pulled off, well provide that element of in that sense of being more thoughtful about your event, which then creates this kind of beautiful expectation about the event as a whole being thoughtful in other areas. And that's where with these, also the accessibility tools that we provide event hosts, that people can see, wow, this event organisers, thinking about details, like event accessibility for patrons with ranging accessibility needs. Wow, this is a really thoughtful professional production. And that goes a very, very long way. Yeah.
Jodie McLean 7:59
I love that. And so Okay, so you started in 2016. So you've obviously, I mean, you didn't have a background in events. But you've obviously now been in the industry for a little while. And I guess we'd have a really unique viewpoint of the industry in terms of the amount and scale of events that come through your platform. So I'm wondering, are there any kind of trends in business events that you see, like any particular types of events that are like on the rise? Or any kind of themes that you're really seeing play out?
Adam McCurdie 8:28
Yes. Firstly, I mean, like everyone's seen on the back of overlocked downs, etc, this slide back to the live experience, as opposed to the online event experience. That's been fascinating to observe that, you know, there was there's this ongoing conversation about online, hybrid live, etc. We're overwhelmingly seeing now that there, at least, currently, there is just no replacement for a live event experience where people can connect people can network people can grow their communities, by interacting with people that's such a big part of the event. And so what we're seeing event hosts do best recognising that then providing not just the production and entertainment value of the event, which is standard and what you have to do, depending on the type of event that you're running, then providing more and more creative opportunities for the attendees of the event interact with each other in more meaningful ways and for more meaningful connections because it's such a big reason why people love going to live events and love being a part of it and part of a community is that meet new people just move to a new city, you name it, like such a big reason why I'm there is not just the content, it's actually it's to meet new people that like similar stuff to me, and we're seeing a lot of that both in business events, too. But more typical, you know, festival entertainment events, you name it across the across the board.
Jodie McLean 9:48
Yeah, I love that. I mean, as humans we are creatures that love you know, relationships and love being connected with each other and there absolutely has been this yeah, as you say in flux back of live events since COVID. bid. And I guess, you know, it makes it really hard to stand out when we are putting on an event. So, you know, when we're thinking about our, our event page or our registration page, like what are some ways that we can make ours convert, like, how do we stand out? We get people to the page? How do we make sure that we're optimising that page for success?
Adam McCurdie 10:18
Right question. We've done a range of things continuing to work on a range of exciting ways to improve this dramatically. So one is the design of the page, we've just done a big overhaul of how event organisers can customise the way the page looks, and also embedding that checkout on their own website to create a cohesive customer brand experience for their customers. So you're not going from the event organisers brand and website, clicking Get tickets, and all of a sudden landing on a ticketing websites page, that's obviously a different world. And so smoothing that out and making it a much more cohesive brand experience or being able to put your own logo instead of humanity, because his logo on the top of the page, dark mode, light mode, accent colours, secondary colours, everything that you can kind of tweak is huge. The second thing we've done is looking at exciting innovations on making the checkout process as quick as possible with just a couple of clicks. And not to bog down that checkout process. One of the main issues really across any ecommerce site, but particularly in ticketing, is getting the person to the page, then having all of these different ticketing options, making it very complicated for them to understand what they need, then they select the ticket, then some platforms do the cardinal sin, which is asking the customer to then create an account, which is, which is horrible, and the passwords not good enough. And then you have to open your password manager. And then okay, now I've agreed to these convoluted terms and conditions. And then now I'm being asked for every ticket, what's the name, the dietary requirements, all this information, and then going into checkout, and then not having things like Google pay Apple Pay, even after pay that kind of stuff to just get people through the checkout as quickly as possible. And so it's humanity's we've kind of addressed all of that, because that's just a huge problem. I mean, I think it's something like 75% of all ecommerce transactions don't finish, they start, and then the customer gets distracted or doesn't want to complete it for a range of reasons. And they're being asked to make an account is the biggest reason for that. The second biggest reason is then being asked to additional data. And so that's where we've done things like, you can ask the customer data after the checkout, instead of only before the checkout, you can choose anything, right? And then after they've checked out, they can then get an automatic email reminder to say, hey, like, let's finish, you know, the details of what we need to know about your data requirements, or whatever it might be for whatever is important for that event, the names on every single ticket, one click Ticket manager for the customer, so they can just go to that email, click open order, and they can update that they don't have to log into an account. None of that nonsense.
Jodie McLean 13:05
Yeah. Because this is something that I do go back and forth on. And it really, I mean, I guess it comes down to the event. But I'm very aware that a registration needs to be short and sharp and easy. But at the same time as the event manager, I need a lot of information from them sometimes. Right. So yeah, I guess what do you think? I guess that's the way around it right? Do you think that the form should be as short as possible? And then we ask questions later, I'm always conscious of having to go back to people later. But is that the best way?
Adam McCurdie 13:34
Exactly. It's navigating this dilemma that you've set, and you're trying to get them through the checkout as quickly as possible. But you've also got all of this information that you need to gather from them. And these are, these are quite in the weeds. But these are the details that and innovations that we've come up with that make the biggest impact, which is get the customer through the checkout immediately as quickly as possible. And then use our tools to cleverly get that information after the checkout. And you can, it's all automated, you don't really have to do anything you can you can add to that and chase yourself as well. But we've got all these clever ways to then get that information after the checkout. But because it's after the checkout, it doesn't risk losing the sale because the sales happen now. So your conversion is going to be as high as it possibly can.
Jodie McLean 14:16
Yeah, amazing. And I wanted to ask you as well, I'm fascinated by like pricing psychology. It's just such an art. It's just It blows my mind, like how it actually works, because it seems so stupid. But do you have any experience or I guess tips around like pricing events, obviously, depending on the event, but I guess do you kind of buy into or see how different pricing affects people's buying behaviour? Yes,
Adam McCurdie 14:41
absolutely. And that's also shifting right now because generally speaking people are starting to buy tickets later. I mean, closer to the event date. Yes. Which is frustrating event organisers to no end because you're, you're wanting to get a sense of with competence, how many people are going to show up and therefore what infrastructure do I need to invest in? and later people buy tickets, the harder that is to organise. Yeah. And so that's that's a trend that's changing now, because people are getting more confidence in live events. Again, I think you know, COVID. And weather had a lot to do with people's hesitation to buy stuff so, so early on, but there's lots of tools where, you know, reading standard things like early bird specials, is, is a great way to do things. But then using things like rather than doing your early birds by date, instead doing your early birds by capacity. So people know that there are only 100 to one early bird tickets, and you can then show that the ticket is selling fast, you can show how many tickets are left when you want to expose that. And so that people are really driving that urgency of I can see that there's only three tickets left, and it's going to roll over into tier two, I better hurry up now, as opposed to knowing I've still got a week of tier one pricing, I'll chat to my friends. And I'll get back in a week and see if we really want to go.
Jodie McLean 15:59
Yeah, I love that. That's amazing. I didn't realise that was something you could do soft to get onto that. Obviously, with
Adam McCurdie 16:05
that pricing psychology, that's where afterpay is now coming in. As a huge value add, we're seeing like dramatic increases in after pay usage specifically, they really seem to stand on their own as their own category of buy now pay later. Yeah, which we're seeing in the numbers is true, which is, which is quite fascinating that there's, there's Buy now pay later, and then there's after pay by now. So that customer base and enthusiasm to prefer to pay with afterpay is very interesting. And we're seeing that more and more that event hosts are getting a boost in sales quite significantly on offering after pay.
Jodie McLean 16:43
Yeah, right. So speaking of the registration, we talked about, like what things you should do, what are kind of the common mistakes that you see people making?
Adam McCurdie 16:52
On the registration page itself?
Jodie McLean 16:54
Yeah, or kind of the the checkout process or or any of that?
Adam McCurdie 16:58
Yeah, the main one is, as we saw, it was making it overly complex customers to find what they need. And check out. You know, it's the old adage of, you know, if you've got the sale, shut up and take the order, and then ask questions later.
Jodie McLean 17:14
Do you think having too many ticket types is a negative as well,
Adam McCurdie 17:18
it can be, we've got workarounds for that, where are solutions for that, where you can group tickets, so that, you know, if you have 100 different ticket types, you can create in different groups inside of the group, there are 10 tickets each, you know, for different days, or different types of sessions or the glamping upgrade or whatnot. And so grouping tickets is really quite a valuable thing to declutter that checkout experience, it's unavoidable that you, you have a lot of ticketing options. But yes, a lot of choice can create paralysis of choice paralysis, where, where I really don't know what I what I want to do, because there's so many options, as opposed to just just the one option. And then really kind of just getting into that, that seamless guest experience. So things like now, being able to think creatively about how we can sell tickets. So one is obviously via the web page and your own website using the humanities kind of ticketing page. But the second, we've now just launched what's called a tap to pay box office native on a smartphone. And what that means is that for the first time, now, you can run a box office, both on the day of the event, but also before in the weeks months leading up to the event. Just straight off your phones, you download the humanities app, it's free, you open up your event. And somebody's let's say you do a partnership with a bar because you're running a food and beverage event. And you're giving them a clip of every ticket that they sell at the bar, you just need to get the bartender or whoever to have the permission to your event on the humanities app on their phone. And they can just they're on their device key in the selected tickets or go to tickets. And straight away, their device will often tap to pay payment, which means somebody would just place their credit card or their phone on top of the bartender's phone, and the phone itself will take payment straight off the card. So there's no longer amazing. Yeah, there's no longer a need for these terminals and square terminals that you name, whatever that hardware is. And so then you can just kind of scale this across as many people as you want. Because there's no there's no hardware requirements, they just need their own device. And with an affiliate code, you can kind of start to do a lot more partnership deals where people are selling tickets more face to face kind of in the old fashioned way. Yeah, you would go to the kiosk to, you know, buy lineup and buy a ticket now because it can happen on everyone's phone. We're the first to launch that. And so we're trying to educate hosts on how creative they can get to boost sales even further now. That's so
Jodie McLean 19:53
amazing. I mean, I was gonna talk about features later, but I feel like we've already gone into so many of them. Even I didn't About Is there anything else? I guess that we haven't touched on in terms of features that you have? I mean, one thing I definitely have on my list to check out is Marchioness at checkout, pardon the pun. But I want to Yeah, embed it into a website and kind of see how that goes. But it sounds like already 10 steps behind, because there's all these other things that I now need to try out. Is there any other features, I guess, that we haven't touched on that you wanted to talk about?
Adam McCurdie 20:26
I mean, there's lots I can go down the rabbit hole of semantics all day. I mean, it's, it's funny, though, because we are, we're a nonprofit, we're actually a registered Australian charity. But our makeup of our team is AF engineers, product people designers, because at the end of the day, what makes our charity able to perform our purpose is by offering the most compelling event ticketing registration platform imaginable. Yeah. Which is a kind of a really cool thing. So that's why we're just constantly pumping out new product, new features, you name it, and we're kind of weekly doing releases on that. So it's, it's an exciting, constantly changing answer to your question.
Jodie McLean 21:05
Actually, one thing, when we're talking about pricing, one thing that I did want to ask you was whether you think people should pass on the feet or absorb it, like, what's your kind of view on that, again, I know would kind of, I guess, come back to the, the event. But I wonder if there's kind of one way that you see being better.
Adam McCurdie 21:23
Most often, we see event hosts passing on the fee. Interestingly enough, because there's there's subtle messaging there on the booking fee, and the checkout that that says 100% Of all the profits of these booking fees are donated to children's charity, it's entirely true that manages to soften the blow, kind of anecdote. So that we think is event organisers more likely to pass on those fees. Depending on the event, though, we see that change. So we see a lot of charity events themselves absorbing the fees are some very big business events where the ticket prices are in the 1000s of dollars, they'll often absorb the fees. But by and large, we see the standard as passing on the fees. And that obviously makes everything totally free for the event organiser. Yeah, the one thing I would recommend is, if, if you feel like you can't pass on the fees, maybe as an interim step, what humanity is offer is the ability to partially pass on and partially absorb the fees. And you can set that ratio, okay to start to experiment and play with that ratio of what's, what's a sweet spot. And maybe for your community and event goers. You want to absorb that the entire fee, but maybe not. And maybe there's there's a middle ground that you can find as a bit of a sweet spot that's worth experimenting with.
Jodie McLean 22:41
Yeah, cuz I do think people understand that they will be, I guess, some fee. And I guess it comes back to the price of the ticket and therefore how much that fee would be. So that kind of hybrid option or suicide.
Adam McCurdie 22:52
It's also why we've intentionally made our booking fees, roughly 30% lower than all the majors of ticketing platforms out there. So people should be saving money whilst doing the right thing with all this millions of dollars going to charity. We think that's the that's the awesome, nobody should be paying more to do the right.
Jodie McLean 23:12
Yes. Yeah, for sure. So what's next for humanity?
Adam McCurdie 23:17
A lot of exciting things. Our we now have three offices in Sydney, Auckland, and Denver, for our Australian New Zealand and North American operation, which is super exciting and going incredibly well as just with the US team now in Colorado. And we went on a week long retreat in Breckenridge, which was beautiful. And, you know, things are picking up for us amazingly, in the United States, which is so exciting. But now, we're moving into the United Kingdom, okay, which is super, super cool and super exciting, as well as Canada. And so really, by the end of the year, we'll be Australia, New Zealand, US, Canada and the UK as kind of our our major operation points, and really getting more creative. Now, not just obviously with the product that continues to improve that event organisers used to sell tickets and helping organise and sell more tickets than they've ever sold, improving things like our marketplace, where humanity is a more valuable asset for driving ticket sales in and of itself is a huge update, but then also getting more creative with how we tell stories about the amazing impact that we're making. And giving that to event organisers as an asset for the sake of storytelling. Because at the end of the day, the only way that the humanities platform creates impact is because event organisers choose to use humanities instead of a different ticketing platform. And therefore, it's totally reasonable that the event organiser should be able to impart own that social impact that's being created because they were the person that chose to use humanities and therefore all of this impacts being made and helping event organisers tell that story is a just beautiful, but be it's a really critical and awesome, compelling point of engagement to their own community to their own brand. And another kind of talking point and aspect to even content creation across their content strategy as well.
Jodie McLean 25:07
Yeah, I mean, imagine this, like an event organiser or company putting on an event could get up at the event and say, we did this with many do. Yeah, that's awesome. And we,
Adam McCurdie 25:18
we facilitate that as much as we can many, many event organisers stand up and talk all about the impact that they're making, just for using humanity x as the ticketing platform. And that is, we want to facilitate that as much as possible. These are our event organisers stories to tell, and for us to help them sell it, and for them to own it for their, for their own benefit. But it's really for it's a win win win for absolutely everyone involved. The only one who loses is the, the older ticketing platforms,
Jodie McLean 25:49
which we won't need. So you've obviously been in and around the industry now for many, many years. And so I wanted to ask if you had to summarise I guess your experience, from your perspective around kind of organising, I guess, particularly business events. That's kind of who listens to this podcast. But if you had to summarise your experience in the events industry and give advice to others who plan business events, like what would you say,
Adam McCurdie 26:15
I have seen the most amazing event organisers start small with really meaningful content, really dialling down getting getting really clear on the value of their event and what it brings the type of people that they're bringing to the event, and then building a very, very strong small community initially, and then that growing over the years into a massive, influential event, whether it be a business event or conference, Association event, you name it. And it's because they got, they got the core right, of what the event is about, and who are the right people to, to be a part of that. And then those people become the evangelists of the event. And building that natural organic evangelism amongst attendees for the event is the most healthy and awesome way for an event to grow.
Jodie McLean 27:11
Yeah, I love that I always talk about, you know, you're putting on the event for people. So it always comes back to them what it is that they want. And if you focus on that, you're going to have a successful event. So I love that great advice. Thank you so much, Adam, for joining me on the podcast.
Adam McCurdie 27:25
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Jodie McLean 27:28
Thanks for listening to this episode of the events Insider PodCast. If you loved it, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, share with your friends, and I'll chat to you next week. Bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
