One thing I wanted to work on for a recent event I produced was how to price tickets to make the event financially viable while allowing access for everyone.

The reality is that event producers need to make money from events to make them feasible — and there are people who can afford to pay, but I also want to find ways for those who can’t afford right now to be included.

So, how do you make space for both?

I happened to be in my co-working space one day when a venue owner from Wellington was visiting, so I took the opportunity to ask him about pricing strategies at his venues.

He said pricing was generally handled by event promoters, as everyone had different platforms and approaches. But he offered one idea that stuck with me:

Why not give someone the option to sponsor the event — as a ticket option?

There are people with enough disposable income who are happy to do that, he suggested.

Unfortunately, none of these mysterious sponsors found us this time around! But I decided to test the idea on a smaller scale.

We also offered a “Paid Forward” community access ticket, where people could sponsor a single person’s admission. And one person did take up this option, which was quickly passed on to another guest.

A small experiment, but a success nonetheless.

Then we introduced a pricing strategy

We offered a limited number of early-bird tickets at half the standard admission price.

This had two benefits. It created a genuinely affordable entry point, while also encouraging people to commit early.

That second part was important because one of the things we regularly hear from event producers is that people tend to purchase tickets at the last minute. This makes it difficult to know whether an event is going to sell, which can undermine the confidence to put the event on in the first place.

We then introduced a sliding-scale price for standard-release tickets, with clear cut-off dates for standard and final-release pricing.

The idea was simple: make tickets more accessible earlier on, while allowing the price to increase closer to the event and recover some of the revenue we had given up through the early-bird tickets.

And then we held the line at the door

We had several people turn up without tickets and ask to come in.

It was tempting, but we held the boundary.

If we don't respect our own ticketing system, why would we expect people to respect it in the future?

The event sold out.

It wasn't a huge money-maker for us, but it was incredibly useful as a proof of concept for how we might ticket and sell future events.

And did I mention we didn't use any Meta advertising?

What we did do was:

• Give ourselves plenty of time to promote the event — more than four weeks.
• Use an intentional pricing strategy rather than a single ticket price.
• Create a community access option based on trust.
• Trust people to take up free/community tickets when they needed them — and interestingly, people still purchased tickets even when free community tickets were available.
• Use PR and partnerships as part of the promotional strategy.

The combination worked for this event.

I can't say whether the same approach would work for a much larger event, but that's part of what makes testing these things interesting.

One final note: there is often a need for event-day only support with smaller roles such as ushering, check-in, AV, etc. These can be volunteer opportunities and offer another way to involve people in a way that works well for everyone.

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📌 This was Issue 57 of The Forward — our regular communication for conscious-minded business leaders.

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