How this volunteer-run event became one of the largest Maker Faires in the world with help from Humanitix

“We found that Humanitix provided capabilities that we weren't seeing on the other platforms. It was simple for us to shift midway through promoting our event - it was just basically importing information and then poof, we were already in business with Humanitix. It had more capabilities and allowed us to use it in more areas, not just pure event management.”

Allen Paschel, Board President of The Maker Effect Foundation

Host with the Most: The Maker Effect Foundation

The Maker Effect Foundation is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to promoting and supporting makers, creators, and innovators around the world. The Foundation's mission is to inspire and empower people to explore their creativity and turn their ideas into reality by providing access to the resources and support they need to succeed.

Their events include MakerFX Makerspace, Maker Faire Orlando, Robot Ruckus, BrightBikes.

Quick stats:

• $70,000 in ticket sales per year
• 12,500 attendees around the USA
• 10+ hours of work saved on the backend on Humanitix
  

The Maker Effect Foundation is a volunteer-run organization that needed a super simple platform that anyone could pick up and use without formal training.

“We use Humanitix for multiple things. It's not just for events. We actually use it to organize volunteers, set up surveys, collect data from our end users, communicate back and forth with attendees and volunteers, create templates and access information effectively. And next year we can simply reboot the event and rinse and repeat from what we did the previous year.”

When they switched to Humanitix, the Foundation saved over 10 hours in manual work.

“One of the prime benefits was we could spread the capabilities of Humanitix amongst multiple people who found it easy to pick up instantly. The team did not need formal training - a lot of it is self-explanatory. The added benefit was not only were we getting information based off of the event, Humanitix also had contact management capabilities which allowed us to manage the whole workflow through the entire process of our event. So the time savings really come from the fact that you're not having to learn multiple tools.”

We asked Allen what he and his team loved the most about Humanitix. Three key things stood out:

Human support

"The people at Humanitix were just really receptive and easy for us to reach out to for support. And that allowed us to more quickly move toward the most important part of what we do, which is putting on Maker Faire and bringing these events together.”

Easy access to data and marketing

“Marketing is built on understanding your customer, and if you're not effectively able to get back the data from email blasts etc then it becomes cumbersome, especially in our organization as we are built with volunteers. So being able to do these things quickly and effectively, and having an organization like Humanitix that is a joy to work with, makes it a lot easier to effectively market our events.”

Humanitix App

”No longer were we stressing about different ticketing hardware being shipped out and not working. For our events we are running with Wi-Fi. So we had to have mobile devices that could connect quickly and simply. Setting it up with Humanitix was a lot easier than the other platforms that we work with.”