Extra tips on creating your paid event

Classlist makes organising your event and collecting payment much easier! 

• Purchasers can pay by using a PayPal account or credit card
• Payment can be collected to a PayPal or Stripe account of the Event Organiser's choice.  
• Admins can organise events and collect the money themselves direct to their own PayPal account.  
• This is useful for Class Admins organising contributions for teachers' gifts, or for PTA team nights out out which need pre-payment! 
• Event organisers can export the information collected to a spreadsheet (export csv file)

How to set up a ticketed event:

NB: You must have a PayPal or Stripe account to set up paid tickets for an event on Classlist.

To set up a paid or free ticketed event, go to the green Admin Side and choose Community Events on the menu. Click 'Create an Event' and fill in the event details (title, date, time, description etc). In the tickets section select 'tickets' then 'add tickets' and select free or paid from the drop down list. 

NB: If you add an RSVP date parents will not be able to obtain any more tickets after that date, regardless of whether there are any still available.  

Remember if you are an admin user setting up a community event in the Admin Mode, all parents will receive an event invitation if they are in the group/s invited to the event, including those parents who have been invited to join Classlist by an admin email but have not yet registered on the site. 

TICKETING FIELDS:

The dialogue box for tickets allows you to add several different types of ticket, eg adult and child with different prices. Simply click 'add new ticket' to add more ticket types. You can select the currency and set the price per ticket, as well as enter the total number of each ticket type you have available to sell.

You can also sell group tickets (eg a ticket called 'table of 8') however the system will only see this as 1 ticket and if you are asking questions there will only be space for 1 answer.

If you want to sell group and individual tickets and have a maximum number available, firstly estimate the split between groups and individuals and then if one is selling faster than the other amend the quantities. To do this reduce the number of the slow selling tickets first then increase the group ticket total (including what has already been sold)   

eg

10 x groups of 8 = 80 + 40 individual tickets = 120 places

12 x groups of 8 = 96 + 24 individual tickets = 120 places

Optional question for invitees: there is an optional box below the ticket fields where you can add a question you want your invitees to answer, eg "Do you have any special dietary requirements?" for an event involving food. 

Currently you can't cap ticket numbers per buyer (eg only two children per adult ticket), but you could put that restriction in your event description text or your ticket name. 

Think carefully when you set your ticket numbers and prices so that you get it right before sending out invitations: it's much harder to keep track of attendees if you change ticket numbers after some people have already bought tickets!

If your event is free but you want to limit the numbers of people attending (eg to comply with fire regulations or your temporary event licence requirements), just select 'Free' from the drop down list instead of 'Paid'. Tap 'create' to save the free ticket settings. 

Underneath the ticket fields you will see the PayPal details section if you are setting paid tickets. You must have a PayPal account to sell tickets through Classlist Events. Add the email address for your PayPal account here.  

• Remember to set up a PayPal account with that email before you start selling tickets, and make sure you get the address correct, or you might find it difficult to get the money from PayPal (but see this page for what to do if this happens).
• Please use a PayPal account that is £ sterling if your ticket prices are in sterling, or there will be a delay in PayPal processing your payments!  

Allow for PayPal fees in your ticket pricing structure

PayPal deduct a transaction fee per person of 3.4% of the ticket price plus 20p per transaction (this is not a Classlist fee!). Include that when calculating your ticket price, so that you don't end up out of pocket compared to what you expect. If your PTA is a registered charity you can set up a charity account with PayPal where the rate is only 1.4% + 20p per transaction, for community events.

Making changes to tickets after invitations have been sent out

You can open the event editing page and add or remove tickets after invitations have been sent, but bear in mind the impact this will have on invitees or your ticket sales figures.

You can add tickets to a non-ticketed event even after you have invited people. This can be useful if you publish an event as a 'save the date' initially, or you want to gauge members' interest before launching into full organisation mode and selling tickets. Adding tickets changes the status of the event and generates a notification to all invitees: anyone who has already RSVPd to a non-ticketed event will be informed that the event is now ticketed and they need to get a ticket. It's best to make it clear in the original event description if this is likely to be the case, otherwise people might not realise they also need to apply for tickets if they RSVP before the tickets were added.

If you need to prevent anyone else buying tickets after the ticket sales have started, you can reduce the number of tickets available so that the total matches the number of tickets already sold. The system will not allow more tickets to be sold once the maximum number has been reached.

Managing your event

From the green admin side if you go into your event you will see an option in the guest list section to send a message. The 3 dots next to each category also allow you to view the list of parents, download a list of who is going or resend the invite to those that haven't responded yet.

NOTES

When someone buys a ticket the funds are transferred from the purchaser to the Event Owner directly via PayPal. The event owner receives a statement from PayPal to show who has paid. PayPal issues several different 'payment status' notices. If your purchasers are unsure what a payment status message means please check the PayPal help site. 

Important: We are currently experiencing some issues with PayPal no longer processing credit card payments. To ensure your purchasers get their tickets, please ask them to checkout using a PayPal account. (If you don't have one it's quick to set one up!). We're sorry for the inconvenience and are working on finding a solution.

Troubleshooting 

NB: Previously PayPal would allow someone to use a credit card to pay for things via PayPal without setting up a PayPal account. If they paid several times across different websites in a short space of time, Paypal would try to force them to open a PayPal account by stopping showing 'pay by credit card' as an option. Recently Paypal has stopped accepting credit card payments altogether: all purchasers must have a PayPal account. We have no control over this unfortunately but we apologise and are trying hard to find a solution!

• If purchasers already have a PayPal account then PayPal won't always show them the 'pay by credit card' option (eg if PayPal recognises their email).  They may be offered 'Pay by PayPal' only.  This confuses a few purchasers if they don't read the info carefully!  
• If the Get Ticket option is not showing on your Event page, check how many tickets have been purchased: you may have reached the limit of the number available.
• Remember that the number of people paying for tickets may be quite different from the number of tickets sold, since people can buy several tickets at a time.
• If you need to keep track of who is coming by name, rather than simply how many tickets sold (eg in a family with 4 children a parent may only buy 2 tickets to the disco - as the organiser you may want to know which children), you should add a question in the optional box (see above) and ask purchasers to state which child is attending. You could also use a sign up sheet in Google docs or similar which you can then cross-reference to the tickets purchased. Here is a link to Google with advice on using shareable links. You can add the link to Google docs in the description field in your event's page. Classlist is working hard to introduce a way of identifying who the ticket belongs to at the point of purchase - watch this space! 

HAVE FUN AT YOUR EVENT!