In the first instalment of a seven-part BNI Education Slots series, Darren Jamieson explains how BNI chapters can use Eventbrite to attract visitors and allow them to book and pay for meetings online.

He begins by observing that many BNI chapters and members do not take advantage of Eventbrite. The platform allows a chapter to publish its meetings online, accept bookings and collect payment before a visitor arrives.

https://youtu.be/XCrHNRP7Zwk

Darren explains that several visitors have attended Chester BNI after independently discovering its Eventbrite booking system. They found the meeting online, paid for their visit and arrived on the Thursday morning without Darren previously knowing who they were.

He recalls one particularly successful example involving a visitor named David. David found the chapter online, paid to attend, visited the meeting and subsequently applied to become a member. When David was inducted, the chapter ambassador asked who had originally invited him. Darren realised that the visitor had entered through his online funnel, making Darren his sponsor even though they had never met before the initial visit.

Also in the talk, Darren shows how the Chester BNI meeting is configured as a recurring weekly event.

He schedules the meetings until the final chapter meeting in December. Rather than creating dates several years in advance and then removing meetings that fall during the Christmas and New Year break, he creates a fresh event schedule for each calendar year.

The Eventbrite listing contains an image, a short 140-character summary and a longer description. Eventbrite also allows organisers to place a video near the top of an event listing, although Darren had not yet used that feature at the time of recording.

Darren describes the ticket as a “VIP Visitor” ticket because every visitor should be made to feel important.

He sets an available quantity of 20 tickets per meeting, although he explains that the precise number is not particularly significant.

The standard cost of attending the meeting is £16. Chester BNI does not absorb Eventbrite’s booking fee, so the fee is added to the visitor’s total during checkout.

This means that booking through Eventbrite costs slightly more than paying at the venue. Nevertheless, visitors appear comfortable paying the additional charge because service fees are commonly accepted on event-booking platforms.

Darren explains that the chapter’s margins are too narrow to deduct Eventbrite’s fee from the £16 meeting price.

Although Eventbrite also supports free tickets, he warns against listing a ticket as free and then asking visitors to pay at the door. This would be misleading and contrary to the platform’s rules.

Darren then identifies Eventbrite’s embedded checkout as one of the most important parts of the process. Eventbrite supplies a piece of code that can be pasted into another website. When a visitor clicks the resulting button, a booking window opens over the existing page.

He acknowledges that ClickFunnels is not inexpensive. However, a chapter may already have a digital marketer or another member who uses the platform. Existing subscribers can often add another funnel without paying an additional charge.

The Eventbrite booking button is added to the page by pasting the supplied code into a custom-code element.

Darren repeatedly emphasises that the copy should be about the reader.

Rather than telling prospective visitors how impressive the chapter is, the page addresses their goals, their business and the connections they want to make. It also identifies the types of people who could benefit from visiting, including business owners and valued team members seeking connections and customers around Chester, Ellesmere Port, Wirral and the North West.

Further down the landing page, visitors can see a list of chapter members. This helps them understand which professions are already represented.

The page also includes:

• A member testimonial
• Repeated booking buttons
• Details and professional photographs of the venue
• A video from a chapter meeting
• Google Business reviews from members
• Frequently asked questions about parking, payment and category conflicts

These elements provide social proof, answer common concerns and give prospective visitors several opportunities to book.

The ClickFunnels page is used as the chapter’s primary website link. People may reach it after searching for Chester BNI, looking for networking meetings in the local area or finding the chapter’s Google Business Profile.

They then read the visitor-focused information and use the embedded Eventbrite checkout to book and pay.

Darren concludes that every BNI chapter should consider creating a similar system. Once it is established, it can generate a continuing stream of visitors without requiring members to manually manage every enquiry.

The Eventbrite and ClickFunnels combination gives Chester BNI a passive method of attracting and converting visitors. Darren encourages other chapters to apply the same principles to their own online presence.

Full Transcript

00:14

Something that many BNI chapters and members of BNI don’t take advantage of is Eventbrite. Eventbrite allows you to list your BNI chapter meetings online so that people can actually book on, attend the meeting and even pay for the meeting without you doing anything.

00:39

I’ve had a number of visitors attend BNI through booking through my Eventbrite link, without me even directing them there or knowing that they were going to book. They just book on, pay to attend the meeting and then turn up on the Thursday morning in the room, and I literally have no idea who they are.

00:58

We had one member of our BNI chapter who found it online, paid for it, turned up at the meeting, applied to join as a member and then became a member.

When he was being inducted as a new member in the group, the ambassador asked, “So, who invited David? Who invited David to the meeting?”

“Oh, I did, actually. It was through my funnel.”

David had no idea that I’d invited him through the funnel. I was his sponsor when we’d never even met. So, it’s a brilliant technique.

01:41

This is Eventbrite. On Eventbrite, I’ve created a listing for our chapter meeting, and it looks like this.

We’ve got a header image of the meeting. It helps, of course, if you’ve got a photographer in your group and they can take professional images, which we have: Raymond Jones of Raymond Jones Images. Fantastic photographer.

Any chapter with a photographer in the group has an advantage over others because you can get quality images like this.

02:06

We’ve got “BNI Chester Business Networking Meeting”. The title is important from a search-engine-optimisation point of view.

“BNI Chester” is what it is, but it’s also a “business networking meeting”. If anybody is searching for business networking meetings in Google or on Eventbrite, then your meeting is going to be found for that.

02:28

We’ve got a short introduction here, by Chester BNI. Thirty-seven people follow Chester BNI on Eventbrite for some reason. I don’t know why.

There’s the location, which you can obviously also show on a map. Then we’ve got a description of the event, a video of a networking Education Slot from Kieran Toner and some photographs of the meeting as well.

02:54

Now I’m going to show you what that looks like from the back end when I manage events.

If I log into my Eventbrite dashboard, you can see net sales for this particular event of £247.92.

03:17

That’s how many there were across all the different meetings. Forty-seven people have paid on Eventbrite and gone to Chester BNI, and I haven’t known who any of them are.

They’ve literally just found the meeting online, paid for it, booked on and turned up.

03:35

An interesting point: only 46 have come, because you will find that people will pay for events online and not go.

Your chapter will get the money. You’ll get the money into the kitty, and they won’t necessarily turn up for it. We had one person pay and not turn up.

03:52

There were 1,238 page views, so 1,238 people have looked at that particular page as well.

But here’s an important point, and I’ll come on to this in a moment: most people who view that event don’t look at it on Eventbrite. I’ll share with you why in a moment.

04:07

This has been set up as a recurring event. All the different events are set up as one, it’s weekly and it’s been done until December.

If I go into the schedule here, if we wait for this to open, here’s the calendar for it. It goes all the way up until the last meeting in December.

04:30

Most BNIs—and it’s probably the same for yours—will not actually run during the week over Christmas and New Year.

There’s no point running it for two or three years in advance and then trying to knock those dates out. I just run it up until December, and then I’ll set a new one up for the next year. I do it one year at a time.

04:53

If we go into the details, here we are. We’ve added an image here. Any image can be added; it’s really not that important.

There’s a new feature here where you can put a video at the top. I’ve not taken advantage of that yet, but it’s something I probably will do. It will require me to create a video at our BNI meeting just to show what it looks like.

05:19

There’s a 140-character summary here, and then we’ve got our description.

Again, this isn’t that important because most people won’t see it here. I’ll show you in a moment.

Then we’ve added the media here. Again, it’s not that important because people don’t see it.

05:37

What is important is the tickets.

If we go into the ticket section here, I’ve called them “VIP Visitor” to make people feel special. Every visitor is a VIP, as they should be when they attend your meeting.

I’ve set it at 20 per meeting. That’s irrelevant. You could set it at five, 10 or 100. It doesn’t really matter.

The price to attend our meeting is £16.

06:03

What I haven’t done is ticked the box to absorb the ticket price. When somebody comes to attend or buy a place at one of these meetings, the Eventbrite fee will be added on top of it.

They’ll pay something like £17.64, or whatever it is.

That means that, if they were to turn up and pay on the door, they would pay less. But people don’t seem to mind paying via this. It’s an accepted thing on Eventbrite.

06:28

Because the margins for our BNI meetings are so tight, we can’t afford to have that £1.64 taken off the £16. It’s going to be too close to what it actually costs for the venue, so we don’t do that.

06:51

You could also have it as a free ticket, but technically that’s against Eventbrite’s rules if you’re advertising a free ticket and then people pay on the door, because it tells them it’s free.

I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You could technically do it, but it’s not advisable because it’s not really allowed.

07:07

If we go into—sorry, leave the page there—and go into publishing, it’s set as a public event rather than a private event.

You want it public so that search engines can find it. You want people to be able to see it.

07:27

The most important thing, when we go down here into marketing and go to embedded checkout, is that this is where people will see the event.

We’ve got a button that overlays a modal window on a page. That means that, when somebody clicks on a button, it opens up like a pop-up window for them to book.

The embed code from Eventbrite is given to you here.

07:50

What we do is copy that, and it creates a button. The actual event is added into our ClickFunnels account.

If I go to chesterbni.co.uk, this is the domain that we’ve created for Chester BNI, and this is what it looks like.

This isn’t a website. This is a ClickFunnels page, and I’ll show you how that works in a moment.

08:12

When you click “Book Your Visit” on that page, all of this being displayed here now is Eventbrite. It’s the Eventbrite booking system.

People can choose to attend the next meeting, on 31 August, click “Tickets”, and then you see they’re paying the £1.64 fee. They can check out there and pay online to attend that meeting.

08:38

If I close that down, I’ll show you how that works now.

I’m going to go into our ClickFunnels account. If I log in here, it should take me straight in, and then go to Chester BNI.

ClickFunnels isn’t cheap. ClickFunnels, on the version we’ve got, is something like $97 a month. I think it’s more than that now because we’re on a legacy platform.

08:58

But if you have a digital marketer in your group, or you have somebody who uses ClickFunnels in your group, then they can add an additional funnel for this.

It doesn’t cost any extra to add an additional funnel.

This is what the funnel looks like.

09:15

If I go into “Edit Page” on this funnel, this is what people are seeing when they find Chester BNI. This is what they’re booking on. This is what they’re coming through.

This is why we’ve had—how many was it? I forget how many it was.

No, it was 44, I think. Forty-four people have come through on that, something like that. Whatever it was, they’re coming through on here.

The important thing is how this is laid out.

09:41

We’ve got a custom button here. When you click the custom button and open the code, that’s the Eventbrite button. It’s literally just pasted into this platform.

We’ve got: “Chester BNI, where business owners meet to support each other.”

You see, it’s not talking about what BNI is, how many times you meet or that sort of stuff. It’s “where business owners meet to support each other”.

09:57

“Thursday morning, 6:45, Rowton Hall. Chester BNI members passed £486,035 in invoiced business in the first six months of 2023.”

That’s actually over—we’re in August now as I’m recording this—that’s over £600,000 now, so I’m going to update that in a moment, actually.

10:20

Now, “About Chester BNI”.

“Our business referral meeting is held every Thursday between 6:45…” Blah, blah, blah.

“Why not join us for a meeting and tell us about your business, what you do, who you’re looking for introductions to and how we can help you?”

Notice it’s about the person reading it.

10:33

It’s not: “We’ve got all these members. We do all of this. We do that. We’re great at this.”

It’s about you.

Tell us about you. Tell us about your business. Tell us about what you do.

That’s the important stuff. It talks to the actual person who’s looking at it.

10:48

“Who is Chester BNI for?”

“If you’re a business owner or a valued team member in your business, and you’re looking to make connections and attract clients and customers from around Chester, Ellesmere Port, Wirral and the North West, then BNI Chester is the perfect place for you to visit.”

It’s all about you. That’s the key.

11:11

Talk about the person you’re looking to get into the group. Don’t talk about someone else. Don’t talk about yourselves. Don’t try to sell BNI.

Talk about the person you’re trying to get into the group.

“We’d love to meet you and find out more about what you do.”

It’s all about you. It’s all about you as a customer.

11:30

Then we’ve got a list of all the members down there, so people can see who’s in it.

We’ve got a testimonial from one of the members here. The button is repeated; that’s the same button.

Then we’ve got some details on the venue, with some lovely photographs from the fabulous Raymond Jones showing the venue. It’s a beautiful venue, actually, isn’t it?

11:50

We’ve got a video here. I think that’s one of the Education Slots.

There’s another button and then more testimonials from other members. These have all been added as Google Business reviews as well. That’s where they’ve come from.

Reviews from the members—and look, there’s me—about what it’s done, so people can see how it has benefited other people.

12:07

Then there’s another button down there and some FAQs on parking, paying on the day and whether there’s someone else in my category—that sort of thing.

That is the ClickFunnels page, which shows up as that.

12:21

When people search for Chester BNI, search for networking meetings within the area or find our Google Business Profile—which I’ll come on to in another video—this is the link for the website.

This is what they find. This is where they come to, and they book through Eventbrite through this ClickFunnels page.

12:37

In my opinion, every BNI chapter should have one of these. Every BNI chapter should have one of these because it will give you a steady stream of visitors without you doing any work, without you doing anything for it.

They will come to you, pay online, visit your chapter, apply and join without you doing a thing.

13:04

As mentioned, in some cases they will pay online and not even turn up, so you’ll be making a profit on people who don’t come along.

ClickFunnels is connected through to Eventbrite.

People don’t look at the Eventbrite listing. They look at the ClickFunnels page because that’s the one that shows up in Google.

13:20

That’s the one that gets the commitment and the buying from somebody to join.

That’s the passive way that I get a lot of visitors through to my BNI, and you can do the same as well.