Recently, I had an X conversation about how we manage attendee registrations and determining how many will be ‘in the room’ vs on the Teams link. NWSCUG is a nonprofit, and we strive to keep our costs down. We previously used EventBrite, but they gradually started remove or reduce the free options (such as email lists and free registrations), prompting us to look for alternatives.

Below, you’ll find what we’re currently doing. Your feedback is welcome; we’ll always try to use the most efficient route. We are all volunteer, so less is more :).

Hybrid Teams Meeting with Registration

While we encourage attendance in person at our beautiful Bellevue location, we’ve decided to stay hybrid in order to include a global audience. As part of registration, we aimed to capture the attendees’ intent (in-person or online only). Recent enhancements in Microsoft Teams meetings (configured as a webinar) have simplified tracking both attendance and attendee intent. A shout-out to Nathan Z and @DenMEMUG for the hot tips on this one.

Take 10 minutes to review Getting Started with Teams Webinars (and if you just watch the 3-minute video, you’ll probably know enough to be dangerous).

And in case you missed the memo, Microsoft is now providing a Microsoft Community Tenant with five E5 licenses for free!

How to Notify Attendees of Upcoming Meetings

Our hosting platform is WordPress.com (the Explorer plan). We encourage attendees to Subscribe or Follow our blog, which will automatically notify them whenever we publish a new post (note: when publishing a new blog post, you can choose whether to notify subscribers).

The advantage of using Subscribe/Follow is that it’s just built-in, and it also allows attendees to opt out whenever they’d like. You can use third-party integrations for a richer feature set, but we decided to keep it simple for now.

So that’s it for now! That’s our secret sauce and it’s pretty low maintenance. Leave your comments or suggestions for improvements below.