Google Analytics for your event

By vinay | Published: January 18, 2012

If you are a keen marketeer, you realize the importance of tracking incoming traffic to your event. With DoAttend’s clean URLs for event pages, it becomes remarkably easy to do this in tandem with Google Analytics. Once you have setup your event page on DoAttend, here’s how you can track incoming traffic to the page.

First off, setting up Google Analytics to track your event page. Assuming that you already have a google analytics account, you need to add your DoAttend event page as a Web Property to your Analytics account. Step-by-step instructions on how to set this up is explained in Google’s help center article. While following those instructions, you just need to ensure that you are entering your DoAttend event page URL (like http://yourevent.doattend.com) for the Website’s URL field.

Adding a new property on Google Analytics

 

Once you’ve submitted the form, you will see a list of all your properties. When you click on the newly added property, you will see a Property ID for it. Copy this ID and head over to your DoAttend account. In DoAttend, click on the Events link and choose your event. Click on the SEO Tools link under the Promote tab. You will see a Google Analytics section in this page with a field asking for GA Property ID. Enter the Property ID here and submit it.

Enter the Property ID in DoAttend

DoAttend will add your Property ID to your event page and Google will be able to track incoming traffic to your event page. Sign in to your Google Analytics account and watch the numbers start ticking!

Many of our customers had requested a way to track sales through affiliates, partners and ads. We’re working on Affiliate tracking separately and it should be out in 2/3 weeks. Watch our blog to stay updated.

Got a great use case for this feature? Or a suggestion on how to extend it? We’re all ears! Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

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Fighting Fit- What martial arts can do for you (Part 2)

By rahul | Published: January 17, 2012

Martial Arts can be a great way to attain fitness and help you overcome all your fears. This was well explained by Ashwin Mohan in part 1 of his article last week. Part 2 of the same article briefs us further on how martial arts can help create positive individuals and in turn a better society.

The Journey

Once the student has understood the use of anaerobic circuits, he has reached a high level in martial arts. In Daoism (Dao meaning ‘the way’, also known as Tao), and Daoist thought, the next thing to do is to learn to “break out of the illusion”, a philosophy similar to Daoism, Budhism and Yoga and to ‘connect with the unchanging or immortal within you’. The changing or evolving part is discarded as unreal by all three schools of thought. Martial arts start focusing on destroying the illusions. When this is achieved the martial artist gains strange powers.

Here at Savage Fighting Arts, what I am trying to do is teach people to align, get their health back, and learn to breathe properly. If they can achieve these things, they have increased their lifespan. There is a sense of clarity and self-worth, which will help them do something positive in society, instead of just being a complaining consumer.

Martial Arts Today

Most people come here because they had a childhood dream that they should learn martial arts. Through martial arts we learn to appreciate life. When talking about wellness, it comes at a very deep level. One thing that martial arts can do for you that nothing else can is to eliminate your fear. You see the futility of being afraid. You replace that emotion with understanding, awareness and compassion. When I understand someone well and I see myself in his shoes, I realise that I would act the same way in that situation. It is not HIM, it is his programming. I don’t hold it against him. I understand that everybody is programmed a certain way, including myself and I keep trying to improve the programming.

Martial arts are always meant to change the face of society. It has a very big social role, much more than artists or scientists. Martial arts are speaking a language that the common man can understand. While things like global warming are happening, all people are worried about are their 9 to 5 jobs. Martial arts can change all that. They can begin to ask the deeper questions – what is it that is holding me up? What is sustaining me? How do I fit in? We start feeling like the expression of an entire whole.

Click here to explore more about courses conducted by Savage Fighting Arts.

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Fighting Fit- What martial arts can do for you (Part 1)

By rahul | Published: January 13, 2012

We at DoAttend love to be associated with a variety of events. Getting to know what our clients do has exposed us to many new and interesting avenues.

This post is part 1 of our first blog post in a series of  knowledge articles written by event organizers we work with.  Written by Ashwin Mohan, program director at Savage Fighting Arts, this post explains how Martial Arts could help you stay fit.

A History

Most people think that Martial Arts are only for wartime effort – to train people to fight. This is partially true but it is important to remember that martial arts were also developed during peace time and these efforts focused only on health. Really good martial artists would make sure that the country did not have many wars by winning most of them, this gave them a lot of free time. Being very active, they started developing programmes for people to get well and stay well.

Starting at the warm-up, martial arts work on joints, circulation, and most importantly the endocrine system. All martial arts focus greatly on the endocrine system, as this is the primary system for the experience of wellness. Usually the endocrine system varies according to the environment, but also depends on a person’s mindset, which is how meditation came into focus in martial arts. Meditation regulates the hormones secreted by a person and keeps them balanced and healthy.

Martial arts in India

Martial arts in India focused on a system of anatomy that was based on the Samkhya Philosophy, which started around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Martial arts in India focused on internal health, which meant the health of 5 primary organs – the heart, lungs, liver, pancreas and kidneys. There was, therefore, a lot of focus on developing the muscles around the core in Indian Martial arts, with little or no focus on the shoulders and the arms. All the power needed for thrusting and fighting was generated from the core. The movements in Indian Martial Arts were modeled on the Big Cats. The legs were kept well-trained for optimal springiness.

Basic Principles

Alignment: The first thing that a martial arts student develops is “alignment”. The feet were always kept parallel and the shoulders and arms were kept close to the body to be able to engage the ‘lats’ (Latissimus dorsi – the muscle on the lateral posterior part of the back), below the shoulder. Indian soldiers did not have big shoulders, they had big lats. Their thighs were also kept very well developed.

Then, the softer side of martial arts started coming up. Martial artists realised that practising a strike with full speed right from the beginning was going to cause some misalignment.  So they started training their students in basic locomotion. A concept called ‘antagonistic isotonics’ helps to explain the relevance of this. Muscles always exist in pairs and function such that when one is compressed, the other relaxes. However, most people are not aware of this basic physics of locomotion and can quite often be seen tensing both muscles while moving, lifting or even walking. Through martial arts, students realise that a muscle needs to be kept tense only 50% of the time. This even helps the person relax the muscle and the rhythmic contraction also makes them calm emotionally.

The bad habit of tension held in the stomach or the back affects the 5 main organs, compressing the; its enough to impair their proper functioning and not release the correct hormones. Bad posture, muscle tension and locomotion are most responsible for causing people to put on weight and excessive weight causes the joints to become weak. My teacher used to say, “Age is not how much hair you have on your head – it is how much you can run, jump and play”.

Breathing: The next thing a person learns is “how to breathe”. This is very important, because people do not spend enough time retaining the breath for it to reach the various parts of the body. A slower breathing pattern enhances health, brings down heart rate/blood pressure, and every part of the brain gets oxygenated, helping the thinking to become clearer. You will be able to see other peoples’ point of view and mature in your brain by using more neuro connections. You can see how everything is connected and you start thinking in-depth. You do not see just the surface and your emotional response to it.

You start to see deeply behind the surface and an appropriate mature response comes about as a martial artist and this is done solely through breathing.

Generation of Power: The next step is “generation of power”. There are normal aerobic or glycolic circuits that people use to generate power. Then, there are anaerobic circuits within the body, which do not need oxygen and that can generate power in a flash, in the process producing a lot of toxins, which are washed out by a healthy circulatory system. Engaging the anaerobic circuits help because it gradually increases immunity to toxins. The body is now constantly able to flush out toxins.

In Taijiquan (aka Taichi) the movement is very slow, but in complete alignment. The focus is on which muscles are tightening, keeping in mind the “antagonistic” pairs, not using an ounce of energy more than required. All of the energy is reserved to do a Fajin (projected power) move. This move is like a bullet. There are about 12 or 13 of these movements. Once a fighter uses them, the body is full of toxins, but not tired and a few breaths are enough to flush them out through the sweat.

Taijiquan (pronounced taiji chuan) has little to do with Chi (the life force), but everything to do with muscular alignment. The powers that one develops with Taiji are called Jin. There are a total of 32 Jins that I know of, which one can develop in Taiji. Bruce Lee used to do something called the one inch punch – he would be able to throw his opponent 4 to 5 feet behind with a really small punch. This is not miraculous – it is Physics. The anaerobic circuit produces a lot more energy than the normal glycolic circuit. Learning these moves can help to divest the body of toxins within a very short period of time, within seconds. (To be contd..)

To read part 2 of this post click here.

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Manage Roles in your event

By Anand | Published: November 24, 2011

Managing events using DoAttend has always been easy for event organizers. But for medium and large-sized events, it is better to have extra hands that can make your life easier and get things done faster.

In DoAttend, if you want to let others manage your event, you have to share your account credentials with them. And they would have full access to all your events, invoices, statements and other critical data. There was not a clean way to let them help you ‘and’ restrict them to just see what you actually want them to manage.

To solve this problem, today we are launching a new feature called Roles. This page is located in Your Event > Setup > Roles. Now you can add people from your organization to your event and let them manage it, without sharing your account credentials. You don’t have to give them full access to your event data. They will have their own DoAttend accounts and will have access rights depending on what role you assign them in the event.

 

People can take any one of these 3 roles in an event.

  1. Owner
  2. Organizer
  3. Staff

Owner has full access to an event. There can be only one owner for an event.

Organizers also have full access to an event, except that their accounts will not be billed for the event’s paid orders. There can be more than one organizer for an event.

Only owner and organizers have rights to invite other people to be a Staff or Organizer in an event.

Staff have very limited access in an event. They can

  • Manage orders
  • Create At-venue registrations
  • Check-in people at the venue using DoAttend Check-in interface
  • Print badges for attendees
  • See attendee list and wait list

There can be more than one staff in an event. They don’t have access to any other part of event Admin section. Also they cannot export any data from the event.

Billing - For an event, only Owner is billed for paid orders and will be considered for monthly payouts(in the case of INR orders).

Event ownership & Cloning:
Organizers and staff have their own DoAttend accounts. The account that creates an event becomes its owner automatically. So if a staff or organizer “creates” a new event, that account will become the owner and it will be billed for that event’s paid orders.

Suppose you are an Organizer for an event and if you want to create a similar event for your organization (under the same owner), “clone” the event. Only Owner or Organizer can clone events. Cloning an event automatically copies all of its people and roles. Otherwise – for every new event you create, Staff/Organizers have to be manually invited.

Activity log:
With more than one people managing an event, it is very important to log every activity. So any action performed by event Owner, organizers and staff are recorded. Only owner and organizers have access to the this log. Click “See all activity” link in the “Roles” page to see it. This log can also be exported to a CSV file.

Notifications to owner - When organizers or staff perform any critical operation in an event (like deleting orders, inviting new guests, etc.,), the event’s owner is emailed about this action.

Add a new person to your event:

  1. Go to Your event > Setup > Roles page.
  2. In “Add a Person” section, write name and email address of the person.
  3. Choose a role
  4. And click “Send Invitation”

The person will receive an email containing a link to accept your invitation. If they already have an account in DoAttend, the link will ask for their account credentials. They can then sign in and accept your invitation. If they don’t have an account in DoAttend, they will have to confirm their new account first. After getting a DoAttend account, they can accept the invitation.

Note – Only after accepting your invitation, the event will be accessible for them.

Resend an invitation:

  1. Go to Your event > Setup > Roles page.
  2. Click on a person’s name. A pop up box will open that contains that person’s information.
  3. Click “Send invitation again”. Invitation email will be sent to him immediately.

Remove a person from your event:

  1. Go to Your event > Setup > Roles page.
  2. Click on a person’s name. A pop up box will open that contains that person’s information.
  3. Click “Remove this person” link that is placed in the left bottom corner of this box. After confirmation, that person will be removed from the event.

Note – the person is removed only from the event and not from DoAttend. His account would still exist but he won’t be able to access the event. Any activity performed by him previously is retained.

Change a person’s role:

  1. Go to Your event > Setup > Roles page.
  2. Click on a person’s name. A pop up box will open that contains that person’s information.
  3. Choose a role – Organizer or Staff.
  4. Click “Save”

Turn on/off email notifications:

When a new order is placed in the event, notifications will be sent to those who are subscribed to notifications. Owner always receives these notifications. Organizers are subscribed by default, once they accept their invitation. For staff, an owner or organizer have to manually subscribe them.

  1. Go to Your event > Setup > Roles page.
  2. Click on a person’s name. A pop up box will open that contains a person’s information.
  3. Check/Uncheck “Send new order notifications” checkbox
  4. Click “Save”
We wanted to make this feature very simple to use and have made sure that this doesn’t come in the way of organizing a great event. If you have any suggestions or queries, please post them below as comments.
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Manage Cancellation & Refunds of Orders

By vinay | Published: November 23, 2011

The much awaited feature, Cancellation & Refunds for Orders, is now a part of DoAttend. For long, event organizers have felt the need for cancellation to help manage the final attendee list, and refunds to organize their accounting for the event.

These functionalities will be available in the Order Detail page of an order. To get to this page, just click on the concerned Order ID on the Registrations Summary page.

Cancellations

Canceling an order will :-

  • remove all attendees in that order from the final attendee list
  • free up the tickets that had been purchased by these attendees
  • mark the order as Cancelled for your records

To cancel an order, simply click on the Cancel link and enter some reference details. Once you confirm, the changes listed above will take effect. Selecting Cancelled Orders from the dropdown in the Registrations Summary of your event will give you a complete list of such orders. As always, you can export this list to a CSV file.

Refunds

Refunds have to be handled differently for customers using Paypal and for those using our INR Payment Gateway.

Those using Paypal, need to initiate the refund process at Paypal. Once that is done, the relevant order’s transaction history will automatically get updated on DoAttend.

For those using the INR payment gateway, you can initiate a refund by clicking on the Refund link on the Order Detail page. You can then enter a reference number, amount to refund if its a paid order and remarks if any. A refund request is then placed with us on your behalf. The refund will be initiated within 48 hours.

If you want to remove the concerned attendees from the final attendee list, then you need to manually Cancel the order as well.

We hope these functionalities further help ease the pain of managing registrations. Do let us know what you think in the comments section below

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Travel and photography companies in India

By shravan | Published: November 21, 2011

Are you a budding photographer whose love for travel is unquenchable?

We take a look at photography events that fit the bill.

1. Travelling Lens

Led by Varun Gupta, Travelling Lens creates unique and customized travel photography experiences. Their photography workshops are a beautiful mix of adventure, relaxation, learning and a lot of fun. Events include one day city workshops, weekend getaways, signature himalayan adventures to Ladakh, Zanskar, Kailash & Mansarovar lasting from seven to seventeen days and even outbound luxury adventures to Tibet and Turkey.

The Deepam festival advanced photography workshop is their next upcoming event, in the town of Tiruvannamalai, 85 kms south of Vellore. This workshop on documentary photography and story telling is led by Yannick Cormier of Trikaya photos. Register for it at http://tldeep.doattend.com/

2. Toehold Travel and Photography

Founded by a bunch of professionals armed with a decade of experience in photography, Toehold Travel and Photography organizes a number of interesting wildlife travel and photography tours in locations such as the Bandhavgarh & Kanha national park, Bharatpur bird sanctuary and the Gir sanctuary. The Toehold team aims to provide an unforgettable travel experience coupled with the right knowledge to shoot stunning photographs.

Besides wildlife photography tours, they also organize one or two day workshops in photography basics at Bangalore, Chennai, Pune and New Delhi as well as kids camps and workshops.

3. Photography on the move

Bringing together the joy of photography and travelling, Photography on the move organizes a plethora of events, ranging from one day workshops to ten day long photo journeys to picturesque locations like the Andamans, Ladakh and Nagaland. A part of Getoff ur ass, Photography on the move urges you to take your imagination away from stuffy conference rooms to hidden places, impervious to the search button.

For those with busy schedules, a one day comprehensive SLR beginners workshop is offered in Mumbai, Bangalore, New Delhi and Kolkata. They also organize advanced workshops in topics such as post production and studio setup for photographers.

4. Darter Photography

Professional photographers Arun Bhat, M V Shreeram and Shraddha Rathi are the brains behind Darter Photography. Their photography workshops and tours are backed with their expert guidance, sessions on various aspects of photography and image reviews. Their tours give you the opportunity to capture images of wildlife, nature and landscapes, heritage sites and street life.

Darter offers travel photography tours to Rajasthan and Varanasi, wildlife tours to Gir national park, Goa and Kutch and beginners photography workshops.

5. Photography Tours

Photography Tours, a unit of Ultimate Travels, helps amateur and professional photographers capture great photographs in the most scenic locations. Their team of professional photographers and tour leaders will guide you to the most amazing spots in your journey to capture stunning photographs.

Their upcoming photography tours in 2012 include the Nepal photography tour, Golden circuit of India photo tour, Lahaul Spiti photo tour and the Bandhavgarh and Kanha national parks wildlife expedition.

 

Choose from one of these unique, offbeat events if you are looking to combine your love for photography and travel, and enhance your photography skills under the guidance of experts.

 

 

 

 

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Win free passes for Nasscom Product Conclave 2011!

By vinay | Published: October 31, 2011

Would a free 2 day pass to India’s premiere startup event simply blow your socks off? Well that’s not surprising at all! That’s why we’re giving away 2 such passes to the most creative tweets you can send our way.

Here’s how it will work. Using the words apple, event and pizza, come up with a creative tweet. Add #nasscompc and @doattend to the tweets so that we can track them. Two of the most creative/witty/funny/smart tweets will win the 2 day passes for Nasscom Product Conclave 2011! We will announce the first winner on Nov 3rd and the second one on Nov 4th, giving ample time to make travel plans.

That’s it! It’s as simple as that. Now fire up those grey cells and get cracking! I’ve done my bit.

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Popular Gaming Events

By meera | Published: October 31, 2011

Gaming and game development have been around for decades, and the industry only continues to grow bigger every day. Ditto with the gaming population. New platforms and interfaces keep hitting the market so often. And best of all, gaming’s gone social! So, where do gaming enthusiasts and game programmers meet, greet and game? Let’s find out.

1. Game Developers Conference

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is easily the mother of all game development gatherings. It’s been around for more than 20 years, and it’s got professional game designers and developers coming together. The upcoming conference in 2012 is set to happen in San Francisco, USA between March 5th and 9th. Some of the interesting focus topics for the next conference include: AI, Social Games, Games for Change, GDC Education, Smartphone / Tablet games, and Social & Online games.

2. DreamHack

DreamHack is on the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest LAN party. It is a Sweden based social gaming event. This year, it is happening between November 24th and 27th. It has a Gladiator style arena with multiple gaming tournaments and a huge expo featuring big names in gaming hardware and research.

3. Social Gaming Summit London

The Social Gaming Summit,London is a conference focusing on the convergence of gaming with social networks and immersive worlds. This event focuses more on the business side of things – monetizing games and converting markets. This year the summit is happening on November 14 and 15. The opening keynote is presented by Facebook’s European Head of Gaming Operations.

4. Gamescom

Gamescom is one of the largest game fairs and exhibitions in the world and it is all about ‘celebrating the games’. It is attended by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts, and is definitely a haven for gamers looking for more grub.  Interestingly, Gamescom uses ‘age filtering’ wristbands to ensure that underage gamers are not exposed to content beyond their age while trying out games at stalls.  Gamescom is happening next in 2012, between 15 th and 19th August at Cologne, Germany.

5. E3 : Electronic Entertainment Expo

E3 is another huge game fair and expo that usually happens in Los Angeles, USA. It is usually a game ‘launchpad’ place, with a lot of developers showcasing upcoming games and gaming hardware here. It is well attended by developers, gamers and critics alike. The E3 awards event is also a big draw. Top game publishers like Disney Interactive Studio, Atari, Creative, Sony, Activision, Microsoft and Sega are all part of this super-mega event. E3 next happens between June 5 and 7, 2012.

With the hugely increasing popularity of tablets and smartphones, we can definitely expect bigger and better game events happening all across the globe, in the near future ( case in point: Angry Birds ! ) . It will be interesting to see how new hardware and application interfaces blend in to provide the ‘authentic’ gaming experience.

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Price-based comparison of email marketing services

By arun | Published: October 7, 2011

Email marketing  is one of the most useful ways to promote your events. Although DoAttend provides organizers a way to email attendees from within the application, event organizers often rely on different email marketing services to reach out to a broader spectrum of audience. Often, pricing  plays a crucial role in deciding which email marketing service could be ideal for an event organizer. This article lists down the pricing structures of popular email marketing services and can help you, as an event organizer make an informed choice.

Most of the email marketing services offer a combination of three types of plans: Free plan, Subscription plan (Monthly or Annual) and Pay-as-you-go plan.

Free plan:

The free plan is often a trial version of the service that offers you most features free for a period of 30 days or less. This plan helps you to try out the different services and aids in making a better choice to suits your needs. Mail Chimp is the clear winner in the free plan category. Whilst most services offer only a trial, Mail Chimp actually offers a free plan (albeit with some limitations). If you have limited needs, you can try Mail Chimp’s free plan,which allows you to send 12,000 emails to a maximum of 2000 subscribers every month.

Subscription plan:

The subscription plan is the most popular plan and is targeted at users who regularly send emails. Pricing for this plan depends on the number of subscribers. If you take an annual subscription, some services give you a discount in the range of 10%–20% on the monthly costs associated with the plan.

If you are looking at connecting to less than 10,000 subscribers, Graphic Mail offers you the most reasonable pricing. At $30 for connecting to 10,000 subscribers, it’s a real bargain. On the other hand, if you are looking at numbers greater than 10,000  you may want to check out Stream Send. At about $210 for 150,000 emails, it’s quite reasonable.

Pay-as-you-go-plan: 

For those of you, who have short-term needs, and do not frequently send out emails, some services offer the Pay-as-you-go plan where you pay based on the number of emails you send. Vertical response offers you a pay-as-you-go plan at good pricing.

If you have used an email marketing service and would like to recommend a good pricing plan, doshare your thoughts in the comments section.

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New feature: Waiting List

By Anand | Published: September 19, 2011

We are excited to announce Waiting List feature on DoAttend. This feature allows event managers to collect and track those who are still interested in ordering a ticket, even after that ticket gets sold out.

Now, there is a setting for every ticket type, called as “Enable Waiting list”. You have to enable it in a ticket’s edit page. Once enabled, DoAttend will show a link in your event page, for people to get registered in that ticket’s Waiting list. The link will be shown only after the ticket gets sold out.

Register in waiting list

When registering in waiting list, people will be asked for their email address and the number of seats they need. These details are collected and stored for event managers to see it any time in their admin section.

Event managers can see the Waiting list by visiting “Attendees” > “Waiting List” page in the admin section. The list can be exported to CSV format. The link to download this list is present in the “Waiting List” page itself.

The event manager could open a few more seats in that ticket, by increasing the “Maximum quantity on sale” count. Once this happens, all of the waiting list members will be emailed about this new availability of seats. The email sent to them will have a link to the event page. People can then register for that ticket and their Waiting list entry will be updated accordingly.

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