We have been overwhelmed with activity since we announced our Free service, on Jan 13th of this year. An astonishing 600 events have been set up since then, making for an average of around 70 per week. The rate of adoption is accelerating rapidly too, as our indicators show that 5% of our attendees are returning to set up their own conferences. A virtuous circle has been established, and we could not be more excited than to serve all our guests.
Our Free service has nearly all the same features as our Professional platform. We have the most advanced feature set on the virtual platform market, and we are continuing to extend that lead. We have added white-boards, personal agendas, attendee-selectable time zones, global date formats, and custom registration fields in the last couple of weeks. On top of this, we introduced our game-changing approach to hosting breakouts, where attendees can move seamlessly from live streams to meetings and back again. The coffee break has been reimagined for virtual.
Go large!
Our Free service has proved so popular that it inevitably has attracted events that are for more than just 75 people. Organizers have been calling us night and day to ask for their registration cap to be lifted. We have been telling these callers to upgrade to our Professional services, which include dedicated account management, extended hosting facilities, training, event design, and customizations. The gap between our Free and Professional services has been too large, until today that is when we are announcing our subscription services.
Effective immediately, event organizers can sign-up online for one of our two subscription packages. The Motivator package costs just USD 149 per month, while the Driver package is available for USD 599 per month. Suddenly events can be hosted on Canapii for up 1,500 people by merely signing up, without ever needing to discuss your requirements or chatting to a human.
So now there are four options to choose from: Free, Motivator, Driver, and Professional. Which is the right package for you? The Professional service offers the personal approach; it is designed for customers with significant events where budgets are secondary to hosting the perfect event.
Our other packages differentiate themselves based on just three criteria, with all having the identical, world-class features of Canapii. The three criteria that decide your package are the size of the events being hosted, measured in the number of registrations, the number of people who can be on the event organizing team, and the event’s length, measured in days.
Let’s explain these criteria in more detail, starting with the not so simple concept of what is a month! A month begins on the day of your subscription, let’s say the 6th, and continues until the 5th of the month that follows. So far, so simple. For the avoidance of doubt, if you start a subscription on the last day of the month, say the 30th, then your month finishes either on the 29th or on the last day of the month that follows, whichever is sooner. That should take care of any complications created by leap years and the tiny month of February.
We define an event as starting on its start date. Doh! Savvy operators will understand that they will be doing plenty on our platform before the event start date, such as setting up the event, ticketing and registrations, rehearsals, and meetings. Attendees cannot join sessions, though, before the event start date that is set in the management console, so this definition for the true start of an event holds firm.
We don’t control how many events you run per month. Whether it is one, or twenty, this is not an essential metric to us. Instead, we count the number of people that register for your events, as that is a better measure of how intensively somebody will use our platform. We know that leaves an organizer with registrations counting towards their account capacity, even when some of those pesky humans don’t show up to the live event. We have accounted for that by making our registration package number generous.
The registration number carries advantages over the number of actual attendees because it is measured in advance of your event. You can contact us on the relatively calm days in the run-up to your big launch to upgrade capacity. We are sure you will agree that is a far better experience than suddenly finding attendees refused entrance because the limit has been reached on the day itself. The Canapii team knows how to run events, and we don’t want to increase the stress of event day. Please also note that if the same person, measured by their email address, registers for two of your events, then that counts as two registrations, not one.
The next metric is the number of administrators for your event. We came to the stunning realization that smaller events need fewer organizers, so we doubt that many customers will find this restriction a limitation. We are different from our competitors because we only need the primary account holder to subscribe to our service. The master account owner can then invite others to administer their event without requiring them to pay for a separate subscription. To clarify, if you are organizing multiple events under our Motivator package, then the account owner can invite four others to run each event they organize. Each of your events can have different organizers, so the restriction there is per event and not per account. This administrator feature is compelling, as you can also decide what level of access to give each organizer. Some may only be responsible for registration and tickets, while others might be handling sessions and sponsors. Restricting the administrators reduces the likelihood of mistakes and increases accountability.
The third and final differentiator between our packages is the number of days an event is posted live, with the start date being day one! Even for our free package, our minimum event length is for four days, which is more than ample for most occasions. There is a difference between virtual and in-person events. A story can spread after an event has finished about a great speech or piece of entertainment, which can encourage new people to register and login post-event. Some organizers want to keep their events open for longer than four days for that reason, which is why our motivator package extends up to 7 days. It is even possible to run an event lasting up to a year through our Professional services.
Our larger-than-life innovation: the rollover
It is possible to sign-up to Canapii, set up the platform, send out tickets and registrations, and host an event within the first month, but that pace will be a little hectic for most. We recognize that signing up for two or three months before the first event will be the more usual behavior. We don’t want our customers to suffer from loss aversion, which says the withdrawal of a benefit is a much more painful experience than the equivalent win. So, we have introduced the concept of a rollover to our packages for those that continue their subscriptions. In the Motivator package, you can carry unused registrations into the months that follow until you have a maximum of double your monthly allowance. For the Driver package, that extension rises to three times the maximum. This rollover feature allows our Driver subscribers to host events for up to 1,500 people within three months of starting an account.
For those who are anxious to save every dollar possible, we would also like to reveal one tip. It is perfectly possible that you set up an account using our Free service, create tickets, build an agenda, and accept your first 75 registrations. If you then start your subscription at that point, we will automatically upgrade your Free event to the Driver or Motivator package. Your setup time will not be wasted. Please don’t worry; the hard work on your Free event can flourish.
What happens if we let our contract lapse?
We hope that you love Canapii and will stay with us for many years to come. Our platform was designed first for face-to-face events and then converted to virtual during the pandemic, so are well placed to be your event management platform provider when in-person events return.
However, we recognize that some people will cancel their subscriptions, perhaps because they don’t have another event to plan. We will be deleting all previous events held under that account when a customer cancels. It does not make business sense for us to continue storing an event for a non-paying customer, but this deletion is also a requirement under the various digital and security laws that we must respect worldwide. If the customer remains a subscriber, we will store events for up to a year while giving them a chance to delete their events at any time.
Our Motivator and Driver packages benefit from our excellent Knowledge base and our soon-to-be-launched Changelog. We will always be on hand in the unlikely event of bug fixes. However, these subscription packages do not benefit from access to our world-class team of event experts, who are only available via our Professional events service.
We are frequently asked, “is our event suitable for Canapii,” and the answer is always “yes.” An event, after all, can be anything from a kid’s birthday party to a movie premiere or the launch of the latest iPhone. We think we have thought of almost everything within Canapii, but if you require something unique, then please get in touch!
