Thoughts on optional ticket price for free webinars?

[Quentin]

Hi All,

A lot of UG's have been offering free webinars, especially during the past few pandemic years.

I've been to some museums where they say "pay what you want for a ticket", and you can choose to pay $0, $5, $10, etc.

Was wondering what people would think about a UG selling tickets for a webinar with those options?  I feel like it's a way to give attendees the option of contributing to help cover some costs (of zoom, mailchimp, etc.).  

Wondering if any other groups have thought about this (or tried it), or if there are good reasons not to try it.

Thanks,

Quentin

[nbrucken]

Hi Quentin,

MSUG has considered charging for webinars, but then we'd have to create some sort of registration system or other mechanism (PayPal, Venmo or Zelle account?) to handle the payments, and I'm not sure if that would cost more than we'd end up making.  For the free webinars, we can use Google Forms or other free survey applications for registration.

Thanks,
    Nancy

[Quentin]

Thanks Nancy,

Our website provider Wix has a registration/payment module, so in theory BASUG could do it.  We used it for our one paid training last year.

But the website registration/ticketing doesn't actually integrate with Zoom.  So one reason we haven't tried it is we'd have to collect registrations on our website, then manually export the registration list and import it into Zoom the day of the webinar.  Not the end of the world, but it would be one more piece of work to do for each webinar.

I think it might be worth it... but I've been thinking that for a year or so now, without actually making the effort to try it.  : )

--Q.

[Reeza]

If it's a series of talks, I prefer a one time membership fee versus paying for talks one by one, mostly because then it's easier to expense back to work.

[Quentin]

Thanks for the thought @Reeza .  BASUG used to have an annual membership fee.  Then at some point long before I joined the steering committee, changed from a  membership organization to an open community with per-event ticketing.  But ticket prices for our meetings have always been intentionally low (under what we pay for space and food), to try an attract a broad audience. We do charge more for our our half-day training classes.  Now with the free webinars we've got a really broad  international audience, which is great.  Just thinking about literally an option for someone to chip in $5 via paypal when they register.  And of course wouldn't need to do it every time, someone could decide to do it once a year, or never.