Velvet Chainsaw - Attendance Marketing Archive
by Dave Lutz, Sarah Michel, Betsy Bair · Velvet Chainsaw Consulting
Roughly one hundred ungated posts by conference strategist Dave Lutz on registration pacing, justify-your-attendance toolkits, first-timer conversion, and audience segmentation. Practitioner analysis with real numbers, published continuously since 2010 under a Creative Commons licence. The rare free source in this space that is not a lead magnet - no gate, no email capture, CC BY-NC licensed - and is written by an operator publishing registration-pacing data and repeatable playbooks rather than '27 promotion ideas'.
More resources on Event Marketing
Pottery to the People - Handbuilding
Handbuilding tips, highly recommended
Hydrology Basics Playlist
Intro to hydrology concepts for civil engineers
Experiential Marketing: Secrets, Strategies, and Success Stories from the World's Greatest Brands
Covers brand activation formats, experiential strategy, and measurement models for events treated as a marketing channel. Draws on Event Marketer magazine case studies and the EventTrack benchmark studies the authors' institute has run for years.
Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People
Written by the People & Company founders, including an early Instagram community lead. Covers finding the first participants, handing them real roles, and turning one gathering into recurring attendance - the organic demand side of filling events.
Event Design Handbook: Systematically Design Innovative Events Using the #EventCanvas
Introduces the #EventCanvas, a one-page framework mapping stakeholder jobs, pains, gains, and the behaviour change an event must produce. Gives event promotion a defensible value proposition to sell rather than a bag of channel tactics. It forces explicit hypotheses about attendee behaviour change - the thing marketing then has to communicate.
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
Parker, a group-conflict facilitator, decomposes gatherings into purpose, guest list, invitation, priming, and closing. The chapters on invitation and pre-event priming are the transferable mechanics behind why invited people actually show up and stay engaged. A first-principles model of why people attend and engage, not a promotion checklist.