The fine art of getting tenants to attend your event

Whether you're a community manager, a marketing manager or a tenant experience lead, events are your responsibility: organising, planning and executing from start to finish. Take the one you're planning now. The location is booked, the idea is decided, and now comes the most important part. Getting people there.

Your tenants are already in TenantOS by Chainels every day, reporting issues and booking amenities. Sharing an event in the TenantOS means promoting it where your tenants already are. Done well, it fills the room and, if you're charging, adds a few more zeros to the balance sheet.

Before event-day

As you start planning the promotion of your event, there are a few things you can do in Chainels to make sure it reaches your tenants.

Write an event message. It appears on the Chainels home screen under Events, so your tenants see it as soon as they open the app.
Decide whether you're charging. Even a small amount tends to lift attendance, because someone who has paid for a place is more likely to use it. For a paid event, select Paid as the event type and set your price. Stripe Checkout handles VAT and receipts automatically, and every registration shows whether it's been paid. Refunds are managed in Stripe.
Choose who it goes to. Send it to your whole community, a single building in your portfolio, or one specific group, and leave out anyone it doesn't apply to. A marketing workshop for your retail tenants, for example, only needs to reach the marketing managers. Keeping invitations relevant is what keeps them worth opening.
Add a deadline or a capacity limit. A deadline gives you final numbers by a certain date. A capacity limit closes registration on its own once you're full, and if someone cancels their place it opens back up for the next person.
Add it to the calendar. Coming soon, so your tenants can see exactly what's on and when in one place.

Before you start: paid events need a Stripe account connected to Chainels, and the minimum price is €2. Inside Stripe you can set your tax rules and add your logo and colours so the checkout looks like your brand. Contact your Account Manager to get set up.

Once it's published, everyone you've targeted gets a push notification and an email. From there, your tenants can:

Sign up in seconds, with their details already filled in.
Say they're not attending, a new feature that keeps your numbers accurate and saves them notifications they don't need.
Bring an external guest, by adding a name and email.
Add it to their own calendar, from the invite that lands in their inbox.

During the event

It's event day. So how do you keep track of who's coming, and who's dropped out at the last minute?

The attendee list shows everyone who registered, along with any guests they've added. You can add columns like phone number when you need to reach someone directly.
Confirmation and cancellation emails go out automatically.
Tenants can cancel their own registration without coming to you.
Paid registrations work differently. A tenant can't cancel one themselves, so they'll come to you, and you cancel the registration and handle the refund in Stripe.

Wrapping up an event

As the event draws to a close you'll want to know how it went. Whether it worked, whether it's worth running again, and that isn't always an easy call to make.

The Statistics tab under Manage Registrations shows you who attended, who told you they couldn't, and who never responded at all. A lot of people saying they can't attend suggests the timing wasn't right. Too many no responses points at the communication instead, and it's worth looking at how the event was announced.

You can also go back to the people who came. Targeted messaging picks out that event's attendees specifically, so a follow-up message or a feedback survey reaches the people who were actually in the room. Send it while the event is still fresh and the answers will be worth something when you come to plan the next one.

Feeling ready for your next event?