6 tips for easily organising online workshops

Every­one likes using their free time to try out new dis­ci­plines, be it cook­ing, DIY or paint­ing. Whether they’re sea­soned pro­fes­sion­als, novices or sim­ply curi­ous, peo­ple trust experts in a giv­en field and take part in their online work­shops. Why not you? Although dif­fer­ent from the tra­di­tion­al in-per­son work­shop, organ­is­ing an online work­shop allows you to share your exper­tise with a larg­er num­ber of peo­ple.

Sum­ma­ry

1. Organ­ise an online work­shop
2. Cre­ate online work­shop reg­is­tra­tions
3. Man­age book­ings for your online work­shop
4. Retain your atten­dees through sub­scrip­tions and pro­mo­tion codes
5. Mod­er­ate access with a pre­mi­um access man­age­ment sys­tem
6. Announce and pub­li­cise the event

1. Organise an online workshop

If you know your future atten­dees will find it dif­fi­cult to trav­el, or you can’t find a suit­able venue, why not hold your work­shop online? With today’s tech­nol­o­gy, you can use video­con­fer­ence soft­ware to run a work­shop as though you were in the same room as your atten­dees.

2. Create online workshop registrations

Now that you’re keen to organ­ise an online work­shop, you might be won­der­ing how to set it up. Once you’ve con­fig­ured your Weezevent tick­et­ing sys­tem — includ­ing the name, dates, times and prices — you can man­age your future atten­dees’ reg­is­tra­tions. It only takes a few min­utes for those inter­est­ed to reg­is­ter, thanks to our intu­itive online reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem.

Using the sales wid­get on your Weezevent min­isite and cus­tomised to your lik­ing — includ­ing the visu­als, con­tent, etc. — each attendee will sim­ply need to select the price for the cho­sen work­shop and then pay online. In just a few clicks, you’ll have your first attendee!

3. Manage bookings for your online workshop

If some of those seek­ing to attend your work­shop don’t want to pay online, you can set up an online book­ing sys­tem for your work­shop. This sys­tem allows future atten­dees to reg­is­ter with an alter­na­tive to online cred­it card pay­ment. It’s up to you to choose the method that these new atten­dees will need to use to pay you, be it cheque, bank trans­fer, send­ing cash, etc. This means that you’ll con­tin­ue to sell online access for your work­shop, but in a dif­fer­ent form.

4. Retain your attendees through subscriptions and promotion codes

If you wish to cre­ate sev­er­al online work­shops, you might want to offer a dis­count to your most loy­al cus­tomers. Since it’s eas­i­er to retain cur­rent atten­dees than to attract new ones, the sub­scrip­tion func­tion will allow them to become a mem­ber and ben­e­fit from prices — whether in the form of pack­ages or dis­counts — that are ded­i­cat­ed to them.

Take the exam­ple of a cook­ing work­shop held once per week. An attendee might want to attend all of your upcom­ing ses­sions as they’re look­ing to improve their skills. With the sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, you can encour­age this attendee to join the next ten ses­sions at a fixed rate, allow­ing them to then obtain a mem­ber­ship code. This mem­ber­ship code will give them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to reg­is­ter for future work­shops with­out pay­ing a pen­ny.

If you don’t plan on cre­at­ing sev­er­al work­shops but still want to pro­vide some peo­ple with a reduced rate, you can do this by cre­at­ing pro­mo­tion codes whose usage you con­trol.

5. Moderate access with a premium access management system

What if your work­shops deal with a sub­ject for which some expe­ri­ence is need­ed, mean­ing novices can’t take part? In this case, you could set up a mod­er­a­tion sys­tem to con­trol reg­is­tra­tions. As the organ­is­er, this sys­tem allows you to accept, put on hold or refuse a reg­is­tra­tion.

If your work­shop requires a cer­tain lev­el of knowl­edge or expe­ri­ence, you could ask for a spe­cif­ic doc­u­ment — such as a diplo­ma or cer­tifi­cate — that the attendee is required to pro­vide when reg­is­ter­ing. If an attendee pro­vides you with an invalid doc­u­ment, you can put their reg­is­tra­tion on hold and ask them to pro­vide the right doc­u­ment. This way, you remain in full con­trol of your guest list!

6. Announce and publicise the event

Last but not least: com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The more you pub­li­cise your work­shop, the more atten­dees you’ll have. With the var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels avail­able today — Face­book, Insta­gram, Word­Press blogs, etc. — you can eas­i­ly let your fol­low­ers know you’re organ­is­ing a work­shop. Weezevent makes this even eas­i­er by offer­ing you ready-to-use shar­ing links and embed codes.

An email cam­paign can be anoth­er good way to draw your past atten­dees’ atten­tion to upcom­ing work­shops. Our CRM tool, Weez­Tar­get, allows you to send and track emails.

Find­ing a book­ing sys­tem, cre­at­ing sub­scrip­tions, man­ag­ing and mod­er­at­ing online reg­is­tra­tions… The range of avail­able options will allow you to organ­ise an online work­shop with the best pos­si­ble tools:

Plan­ning a work­shop