USA edition. This guide is written for volunteer-run clubs in the United States. Where rules differ — grants, tax, incorporation, safeguarding — follow the USA-specific pointers below or check with your national body.
The room seats 220. The function committee has settled on a price, the caterer needs numbers by the Wednesday before, and somebody has just volunteered to "set it up on one of those ticket sites" because it takes ten minutes and the club does not have to touch anyone's card details. By Friday there is a link. By the following Tuesday there are eighty sales, and a group chat where three people are asking whether the extra charge at checkout was a mistake.
Nothing in that sequence is wrong. External ticketing sites are competent, reliable products that solve a real problem, and a club with no other option should absolutely use one rather than run a cash-and-envelope system. But the decision is usually made on the wrong axis — speed of setup — when the axes that actually matter are three: what the fee structure does to a cheap ticket, who holds the attendee list after the lights go up, and how the door runs when a family arrives with two tickets and a printer that did not work.
This guide is for whoever is organising the club's next paid event — the annual awards evening, the quiz night, a fundraising dinner, a carnival with entry on the gate. It compares selling through an external ticketing site against selling from your own club website, and it does the arithmetic rather than asserting a conclusion. We build a club platform with ticketing in it, so read our recommendation with that in mind; the section on when an external site is genuinely the better call is written in good faith and we mean every line of it.
Two ways to sell the same seat
Selling through an external site. You create the event on someone else's platform, and share a link. They take the money, hold it, charge a fee, and pay you out after the event or on a schedule. Buyers land on a page with that platform's branding, and they become that platform's customers as well as yours.
Selling from your own site. The event page lives on your club website, tickets are bought there, and the money goes to your club's own payment account through a card processor. Buyers never leave your site, and the record of who bought what sits with the rest of your member and event data.
Everything else — QR codes on tickets, allocated seating, capacity limits — is available in both worlds. The difference is not features. It is the fee model, the ownership of the resulting list, and how many places a volunteer has to look on the night.
Reading a fee structure properly
Almost every ticketing fee is built from the same three numbers. Get all three before you compare anything.
- A percentage of the ticket price. The headline number, usually somewhere between two and seven per cent.
- A fixed amount per ticket. The number that quietly decides everything, because it does not shrink when your ticket is cheap.
- Card processing. Sometimes bundled into the first two, sometimes charged separately on top. Ask explicitly which.
Then ask the fourth question, which is not a fee at all — when do we get the money, and do we get it before we have to pay the caterer.
Who pays the booking fee
There are three models, and choosing between them is a real decision rather than a formality.
| Model | Buyer sees | Club receives | Where it hurts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Club absorbs the fee | The advertised price, exactly | Face value minus the fee | Straight off your margin, and worst on cheap tickets |
| Fee passed to the buyer | The price plus an extra line | Face value in full | Complaints, abandoned checkouts, and it looks like the club added it |
| Split between the two | A smaller extra line | Face value minus a share | Nobody can explain it, including the person who set it up |
The passed-on model is the most common because it protects the budget, and it is also the one that generates the "why is it more than the poster said" messages. For a community club that is not a trivial cost — the poster price is the price people repeat to each other, and a surprise at checkout reads as the club being sneaky even when it plainly is not.
Why the fixed fee is the number that matters
Percentages behave the way you expect. Fixed per-ticket fees do not, and this is where club events get hurt, because club tickets are cheap.
Work it as a proportion. If the fixed component of a booking fee is equal to one-tenth of your ticket price, you are handing over ten per cent before the percentage fee is even applied. On a ticket four times that price, the same fixed amount is two and a half per cent. Same platform, same event, a four-fold difference in what it costs you — determined entirely by how you priced the ticket.
Three consequences follow, and they are worth putting in front of the function committee:
- Cheap tickets are punished hardest. A junior end-of-season afternoon at a low ticket price can lose a tenth of its takings to a fee structure designed for concerts.
- Family bundles beat individual tickets. One transaction of four seats pays one fixed fee. Four separate purchases pay four. If your platform charges per ticket rather than per order, check which — it changes the advice you give parents.
- Free events are not always free. Some platforms charge nothing for free registrations and some do not. If you are running a free come-and-try day purely to collect names, confirm this before you build the page.
As an illustrative example for clubs in the United States — check current rates yourself — a banquet ticket at US$40 sold through a platform charging roughly 5% plus around US$1.50 a ticket costs about US$3.50 a seat, or US$770 across 220 seats. Selling from your own site at card rates of roughly 2.9% plus a fixed amount lands closer to US$1.50 a seat. Fixed per-ticket components tend to be higher here than in most markets, which makes cheap tickets and per-ticket rather than per-order charging worth checking carefully.
The fee that is not the fee
Four costs sit outside the headline rate and none of them appear on the pricing page.
- Payout timing. If the platform holds funds until after the event, your club is float-financing the caterer, the venue deposit and the trophies out of its own account. For a small club that is the difference between a comfortable month and an awkward one.
- Refund handling. Ask what happens to the booking fee when a ticket is refunded — on some platforms it is returned and on others it is retained, and the difference decides what a cancellation actually costs you.
- Chargebacks and disputes. Rare, but decide in advance who deals with one and where the fee lands.
- The volunteer hour. Somebody exports a list, reformats it, cross-checks it against the member roll, and re-types names into a seating plan. That hour has a real cost and it is invisible in every comparison table ever written.
What happens to the attendee list afterwards
This is the part committees discover a year late. Two hundred and twenty people bought a ticket to your event. Who has their details tomorrow?
| After the event | External ticketing site | Your own site |
|---|---|---|
| Where the buyer list lives | On their platform, exportable while your account exists | In your club's own records |
| Whether buyers are matched to members | No — a name and email, unlinked | Matched to the member record if they have one |
| Marketing permission | Often held by the platform, not transferred to you | Yours, collected on your page |
| Who they hear from next | The platform, about other events near them | Your club, about your next one |
| Whether last year's buyers are easy to reach | Only if someone kept the export | Yes, they are in the same list as everyone else |
| What the finance record looks like | A lump payout to reconcile by hand | Per-order records against the event |
The commercial argument is short. A ticket buyer who is not a member is the warmest lead your club will ever get — they have already paid you money and turned up. If their details land in someone else's system, that lead expires quietly. If they land in yours, next season's junior sign-up email goes to them automatically along with everyone else.
There is a governance argument too, and it is the one that bites at handover. When the function coordinator steps down and their platform account goes with them, three years of attendee history goes with it. Clubs lose this every single year. A list held on your own site is covered by your ordinary committee handover checklist rather than by whether somebody remembered to export a spreadsheet.
Practical middle ground if you do stay external: export the buyer list the morning after every event, without fail, and add it to your own records with a note of which event it came from. Put that step in the event run sheet as a named job with a named owner, because "we'll do it later" is how the list disappears.
The night itself — door, capacity and refunds
Everything above is arithmetic. This is where the choice is actually felt, because the door is staffed by volunteers under time pressure.
The door run sheet
| Time | Job | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Day before | Print or download the door list, sorted by surname. Print a paper copy regardless of how good the app is. | Coordinator |
| Day before | Confirm the final number with the caterer, and note the exact cut-off you agreed | Coordinator |
| 90 min out | Two people on the door, one device each, one list between them | Volunteers |
| 60 min out | Cash or card float ready for walk-ups, and a decision already made on the walk-up price | Treasurer |
| On arrival | Check the name, mark it off, hand over the wristband or table number | Volunteers |
| Half time | Reconcile walk-ups against the float | Treasurer |
| Next day | Export or file the attendance record, reconcile takings, note the no-show rate | Treasurer |
Three rules that survive contact with reality:
- One list, not two. The single most common door failure is a pre-sold list on a phone and a walk-up list on paper, with nobody merging them. Whatever you use, everyone marks off in the same place.
- Assume the venue wi-fi fails. Print the list. Every time. A phone with no signal at a country ground is not an edge case.
- Decide the walk-up price before the night. If it is the same as pre-sale you have taught people not to pre-buy, which wrecks your catering numbers next year. A modest premium at the door is normal and fair.
Capacity, and what "sold out" should mean
Set the capacity below the room's legal limit, not at it, and hold back a small allocation. You will need seats for a late sponsor, a life member nobody thought to invite, and a family whose payment failed. A ticket page that hard-stops at the true maximum turns those into embarrassments.
If you are running the whole thing yourself, RSVPs and attendance let you see confirmed numbers before the door opens, and discount codes cover the committee comps and the sponsor allocation without a separate ticket type for each.
Refunds
Write a refund line onto the ticket page before the first sale, in plain language. It should say what happens if the buyer cannot come, what happens if the club cancels or postpones, and by when. Most disputes are not about money; they are about a rule nobody stated.
Refund expectations in the United States vary by state, and both state consumer-protection rules and any nonprofit-status obligations can apply to how you handle a cancelled event. Treat this as general information, publish clear terms before the first sale, and check with your state association or an adviser if you are running a large ticketed fundraiser rather than a club dinner.
The parts of the night that need more than a ticket
A club event is rarely just a ticket. There is usually a bar, a raffle or auction, a sponsor's table, and a menu choice the caterer needs a week out. These are the things that push clubs towards an external site for the ticket and then leave them managing everything else in a spreadsheet anyway.
In the United States, alcohol service and charitable raffles are both regulated at state and often municipal level, and the rules for a nonprofit running a raffle differ sharply between states — some require registration, some prohibit certain formats outright. Treat this as general information and check your state's requirements before you print a ticket that promises either.
When an external ticketing site is genuinely the right call
We would rather you ran the event well than ran it on us. Use an external site when:
- The audience is mostly strangers. A public festival, a concert or a community fun day where discovery genuinely matters and the platform's own listings will sell tickets you would never reach.
- You need allocated seating or complex tiering — assigned tables with named guests, multi-day passes with session selection, timed entry slots at scale.
- The event is a one-off run by a sub-group with no access to the club's website, and setting up access is more work than the fee is worth.
- Your club has no online payment set up at all and the event is next month. Take the fee, run the event, and fix the underlying problem afterwards.
The reverse test is equally clear. If the buyers are overwhelmingly your own members and their families, if the ticket is cheap, if this event recurs every year, and if you would like next year's invitation to go to this year's guests — you are paying a discovery fee for an audience you already have.
Selling the night from the same place you announce it
The practical version is that the event page, the ticket, the door list and the follow-up email should all be the same object. In ClubHelix your event pages and ticketing live on your own club site, so the page you shared on the club's social account is the page that takes the money; discount codes handle sponsor comps and early-bird pricing; RSVPs and attendance give you the door list without an export; and your club shop can sell the raffle book or the polo shirt in the same checkout. Buyers stay on your site, the money lands in your account, and the list of who came is simply part of your club's records.
If your next function is already in the diary, this is a change you can make before tickets go on sale. There is a free tier to try it on, pricing that is published rather than quoted, and the whole thing is built and hosted by a small independent team. Set your club up and have the event page live tonight — how to promote a club event covers what to do with the link once you have it.
Frequently asked questions
Should our club use an external ticketing site or sell tickets ourselves?
Sell them yourself when the audience is mostly your own members and families, the ticket price is modest and the event recurs — you keep the fee, the attendee list and the ability to invite the same people next year. Use an external site when you genuinely need to reach strangers, when the seating or session structure is complex, or when you have no payment setup and the event is imminent.
Who should pay the booking fee?
Whichever you choose, say so clearly on the ticket page. Absorbing the fee protects the advertised price and avoids checkout complaints but comes straight off your margin. Passing it on protects the budget but generates questions, especially on cheap tickets where a fixed per-ticket fee is a large proportion of the price. Do not split it — nobody can explain a split, including the person who set it up.
What happens to our attendee list after the event?
On an external platform the list lives in that account and is only yours in practice if somebody exports it. When you sell from your own site the buyers are already in your own records, matched to member records where they exist, which means next year's invitation and next season's membership email reach them without anyone remembering to do anything.
How do we handle refunds for a cancelled club event?
Publish a refund policy on the ticket page before the first sale, covering both a buyer who cannot attend and an event the club cancels or postpones. Ask your platform what happens to its own booking fee on a refund — some return it and some retain it, and if it is retained then cancelling costs you money you never received. Consumer law in most places gives buyers rights that a blanket "no refunds" line does not remove, so keep the policy honest and take advice if the event is large.
Can we take tickets at the door as well as online?
Yes, and most club events should. Set a walk-up price slightly above pre-sale so families still have a reason to book ahead and your catering numbers stay useful, have a float ready, and make sure walk-ups are marked off on the same list as pre-sales rather than on a second piece of paper nobody merges afterwards.
Keep reading — how to run a presentation night covers the event itself end to end, and how to organise a sports carnival deals with entries and gate takings at a much bigger scale.
