Submitted by David Crane on Sun, 01/18/2009 - 20:29
This week a couple of things came up that just fell together. A business associate was looking to put on a series of events in a couple months. He was starting to look at ways to market the event and manage the registrations.
He has a nice website built on Drupal and was looking at all sorts of changes to do and needed to know what was needed. The code changes where fairly expensive (Money is tight). Now he has a large email list and was looking at doing a mail merge with Outlook for a newsletter or use Drupal Newsletters. Neither were a good solution for his needs and budget. I have assisted several companies on the newsletter issue and have been using a great tool called iContact due to the ease of use and the reporting on opened email and bad or bounced addresses plus built in code to be removed from the email list. iContact was easy to setup and manage small to large email campaigns and went on to be their web service of choice. After a brief tour he decided to use their services.
Now that we had the method to get the information out to his contact list we needed a system to manage the reservations. Having a good website is handy but coding for things like this can be expensive. Drupal could do this and if someone was going to have long term use I would say put the resources in to it. But if money is tight there are good web services for this as well. I had recently had a discussion with the employ of a reservation management web service on this problem. By odd chance I found that it was used on an event I attended back in October here in Austin. At the time I was impressed and had done a little research. In talking with the owner I was given a deeper overview of the product. ETouches has a piece of software that can be easily added to a web site and it takes the user through the registration and collection of fees for your event so you don’t have to do the credit card transaction on your own site and then services on top of that for marketing. The price per transaction depends on the service provided but is very reasonable.
So we got 2 items of his check list for setting up his event now the fun stuff.
