Event Attendee Best Practices

Finding Attendees

Email reminders: Send attendees a reminder email the day before to increase turnout.

You can collect RSVPs for your event with many different tools—here are a few options and what they're great for:

GitHub Issue: Create an issue and ask people to comment on it with their details to let you know they're coming. This helps get new people engaged with your repo and taps into your existing source of interested members. Downsides: Manual to count people and manage details or impact of outside promotional efforts
Meetup: Creating a local Meetup group helps promote continual visibility. Downsides: There's an annual fee for running a Meetup group.
Eventbrite: Free to use for free events, promotional tools and ability to email your attendees (including surveys), lots of reporting tools (with info exporting and API), integration with Lanyrd and other partners, event info exports, surveys. Downsides: Not localized in all countries.
Tito: Free to use for free events, integration with Lanyrd
Typeform: Super easy signups forms with interactive steps, worked perfectly for users without Github accounts and also mobile-friendly

Code of Conduct: Adopt a code of conduct and make it easy for people to get help if they need it. Here's how to create one.
Breaks: Announce breaks—people who are head's down can stay that way, but plenty of people will appreciate the prompt
Celebrate success: Encourage people to throw their hands in the air and yell 'WOOOO!!' each and every time they complete a challenge, as it tends to keep the ambient noise level up which encourages more question asking

Send out a survey after the event to find out what people loved and what you can do better next time. Making this a mix of structured feedback (e.g., on a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend a NodeSchool event to a friend or family member) and free-form responses (e.g., If you could've changed one thing about this event, what would it have been?) will get you the best mix of actionable insight.

Attendance drops: For free events you can expect a decent percentage of people to not attend.

good information for learning