Carnivals, Casino Nights, and Trivia Nights are typically non-bidding events centered around fun community activities. You can use your site to sell admission to these events, and to sell incidentals associated with them.
Best Practices and Tips
To allow folks to pay-as-they-go for ride/game tickets, chips, etc., enable gala cash transactions (allow guests to pre-pay cash for purchases) on your site. Or, if you’re not selling tickets to your event, you can use the Point of Sale feature to enter these sales.
It’s easy to run a very small silent auction in conjunction with any of these events. Rather than selling tickets/issuing bid numbers, use Point of Sale to sell items. This allows you to simply enter the winner/buyer name, rather than assigning winning items to bid numbers.
All game tickets, drink tickets, meal tickets, raffle tickets, trivia mulligans, or any other component sales associated with your event should be set up as Sellable-type items in your catalog.
For Carnivals: sell wristbands as ticket types. But game/ride tickets must be sold as Add-on Items, so that folks can easily make additional purchases of these throughout the event.
For Trivia Nights: you can use the Tables/Seating feature to assign folks to teams. And you can set up a Table ticket type to allow buyers who know their team members to register everyone together.
For Casino Nights: set up additional stacks of chips as Sellable items in your catalog, so that folks can continue to play throughout the evening.
Things to Consider or Avoid
Avoid holding a large auction or live auction in conjunction with these events. Because their attention will be elsewhere, your attendees may not be focused enough on bidding to make the work that goes into planning a large auction pay off.
Unless your organization has a strong tradition of running a Carnival, you may find that the volunteer lift and expenses involved outweigh the benefits of the community experience. Carnivals require numerous volunteers to organize and run multiple game/ride stations, solicit prizes (most of which are destined for a landfill near you), promote the event, set up and clean up.
How will you handle family admissions? Will tickets (or, for a carnival, wristbands) be sold individually? Or will you sell a “family pack” with a certain number of wristbands?
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