Why We Include Multiple Events in Our annual plans
The most common conversation I have with prospective customers surrounds one particular aspect of our product design: it’s a annual plan, which allows you to run multiple events for your organization (no sharing with other schools or nonprofits, please) during the annual plan term.
This can cause panic (that’s not our intent, I promise!) - I’ve had a LOT of people call me and tell me that they like our software but don’t think they should buy it because their group only does one auction each year.
Here’s the secret: 98% of our customers only hold one auction per year. So why do we tout the fact that you can do more?
This is rooted in our company’s early history, when we were figuring out how to make our company the friendliest, easiest-to-work-with auction-software company is the universe. (Still our goal, by the way.) We initially sold the software on a per-event basis, and that was good. But our early customers kept coming back with a common request: they had additional, smaller uses that they could put the software to, but those didn’t justify paying for a whole additional event.
These were uses like: selling tickets to the spring play, through the online registration. Or selling wreaths and other greenery at the holiday season. Or just for running credit-cards at a rummage sale. Not auctions, and not a whole lot of work for us to support. These were reasonable requests!
So we changed our pricing. We didn’t raise it at that time, we just changed the terms to allow for you to create a few additional event sites during your annual plan, for these ancillary uses.
At first, we said that you’d get unlimited events. That turned out to be REALLY scary for people - it made it look like you could never get enough use out of it to really get your money’s worth. So we scaled it back - we now say that subscribers get 4 sites. But please know that if you ever need a 5th or 6th, we’ll be happy to throw that in.
