Cloud-based solution makes life easier for event organizers and registrants. Now to get event organizers to use it.
I’m a massive fan of HelloSign. I seem to have an ever-increasing number of documents to sign and forms to fill out. This, coupled with the fact that I don’t work from one fixed location, means that I always had lots of frustration when it came to form filling. Having to find a printer to print a form out, a pen to fill it in and then some way of digitizing the form to send it back was a real pain.
I haven’t had to do any of that for a year or two now—I simply use HelloSign (and its super-handy Gmail integration) to fill in, sign and send forms in a flash. So, now that my business form signing problems are solved, what other areas can HelloSign help with?
In another part of my life, I’m a runner and enter various running races on a fairly frequent basis. The race registration process also has issues, with paper registration and waiver forms being the norm. Given that, I was interested to hear about a new partnership between Eventbrite, the global ticketing platform, and HelloSign. The new HelloSign extension is designed to let event organizers (and not just sporting events, either) collect waivers and forms quickly and easily—and in a legally binding manner.
I’m also a big user of Eventbrite. And while there are only a handful of events that I sign up for that need forms to be signed, this integration will help with those. In terms of how it works, once the extension is enabled, any registered attendees will automatically receive the required forms for completing and signing.
This isn’t a bonus to just event participants, but it is also a time-saver for event organizers. Using the integration, event organizers can:
- Send event documents immediately to attendees who have already registered at and automatically to any new attendees as they join
- Create templates for documents that are sent repeatedly
- Auto-fill text fields in documents with attendee information pulled from Eventbrite
- Get real-time tracking and export of completion status of documents out for signature
- Send custom waivers for different ticket types
- Brand event documents with their logo, company name and more
“We recognize that managing liability waivers can be an incredibly complicated process for event organizers, especially for endurance events that typically have thousands of participants,” said Dylan Serota, Head of Platform at Eventbrite. “When evaluating potential integration partners to streamline this process, HelloSign’s ease of use, incredible design and powerful functionality aligned perfectly with our vision of creating a seamless document flow for our customers.”
My POV
This is awesome. What’s not to like? Well, the only thing not to like is the fact that, alas, event organizers tend not to be huge adopters of tools like this. Maybe it’s just me, but the majority of races I enter still use horrible web-based (or, worse, paper-based) forms and systems. Hence, this partnership, while pretty awesome in terms of potential, still needs to find ways to get traction in the user space.
That said, a partnership like this, which so obviously makes life easier, tends to generate a bit of viral uptake. If I think about my own situation and use of HelloSign within a business context, there are a number of organizations I’ve introduced the product to through my use of it. (The ultimate viral method: have a form for others to sign? Send it to them via HelloSign, and all of a sudden they become a prospective user of the service.)
While this won’t change the world anytime soon, partnerships and integrations like this will continue the slow but inexorable growth of cloud-based solutions.
