How to run a free event (and still know who’s coming).

“Just turn up” works for some events. For most, it leaves you guessing about the things that matter most on the day. A free ticket fixes a few problems at once:

• Headcount. You know roughly how many people to expect, so you can order the right amount of food, set out the right number of chairs and staff the door properly.
• Capacity.When the tickets run out, they run out. You won’t end up with a fire-safety problem or a queue of people you have to turn away at the door.
• Check-in. Scanning tickets tells you who actually came, which is useful for funders, sponsors, venues and your own planning.
• A contact list. After the event you can export your customer list, including whether each person gave marketing consent. Only contact people who agreed, and you have the start of an audience for the next one.

It also changes how people treat the event. Claiming a ticket is a small commitment, and people who’ve made one are more likely to put the date in their calendar.

A free ticket is a ticket type with a price of zero. Everything else works the same as a paid ticket: it has a capacity, a maximum per order and an optional sales window. Set the max per order low (two to four is typical) so one person can’t claim a block of tickets for friends who may never come.

Make it obvious on the page that the event is free but needs a ticket. Put “Free, ticket required” near the top and repeat it in your posts. Otherwise some people will assume they can just turn up, and you’ll lose the headcount you set up tickets to get. If you expect walk-ups anyway, hold back part of the room for them rather than releasing every place online, and say so on the page.

If you want to release tickets in waves (say, half now and half a week before), create two free ticket types with their own sales windows. That keeps a few places for people who hear about the event late.

Write the event page as carefully as you would for a paid event. People still need the date, start time, address, accessibility details and what to expect. A free event with a vague page gets a lot of claims from people who weren’t really planning to come.

One thing to plan for: before anyone can claim tickets, your organization needs to finish the one-time identity check with Stripe, even if every ticket is free. It takes a few minutes, so do it while you build the page.

Everyone who claims a ticket gets an email with a QR code per ticket, and a reminder the day before. That reminder is one of the better tools you have against no-shows. If someone loses their email, they can recover their tickets at /find-tickets.

Free events get more no-shows than paid ones. Nobody has lost money by staying home, so a rainy evening or a better offer wins more easily. How many depends on your audience, the weather, how far ahead people claimed and how committed your crowd is. Your own past events are the only reliable guide, so keep a record: tickets claimed against tickets scanned.

Once you know your usual show-up rate, you can release more tickets than the room holds. If a room holds 100 and your past events tell you about three-quarters of claimed tickets get used, offering somewhat more than 100 tickets is reasonable. Be careful with this:

• Over-allocate cautiously the first time, and never beyond what you could actually handle if everyone came.
• Hard limits like fire-safety capacity aren’t a place to gamble. If the venue’s legal limit is 100, the safe plan is a door count that stops at 100, whatever the ticket count says.
• Say on the event page that entry is first come, first served once the venue is full, so nobody feels misled.

You can also lower no-shows directly. Ask people to cancel if they can’t make it (you can refund or cancel free orders from your dashboard, which frees the ticket back up). Post a reminder on your socials the day before. Don’t open claims too far ahead of a small, casual event.

Many events work best with both. A community talk might offer free general entry plus a paid tier with a reserved front section. A launch party might keep entry free and sell a VIP ticket that includes drinks. A school or charity event might have free tickets for students alongside paid ones for everyone else.

Each ticket type has its own price and capacity, so you can set this up on one event page, with a separate capacity for each tier so the free places can’t eat into the paid ones (or the other way round). For the paid tiers, you decide per ticket type whether to absorb the Jamrats fee or pass it to buyers, and the fees page shows the current numbers for your country.

Paid tiers also help with no-shows. Even a small price increases commitment, so if no-shows are hurting a popular free event, a low-priced tier next to a smaller free allocation is worth testing. More examples are on the free events page.

Check-in for a free event works the same as for a paid one. Door staff scan QR codes with the Jamrats Organizer app on iOS or Android, or with the browser scanner. Any phone works, and you don’t need extra hardware. Several people can scan at once, which helps when a free event draws a crowd all at the same moment, and tickets that have already been scanned are flagged so nobody gets in twice on one ticket.

For groups, scan one ticket on the order and check the whole group in together. Each ticket also has its own number, so you can sort out mix-ups at the door.

Scanning needs an internet connection. Community halls, parks and basements often have poor signal, so test at the venue in advance and bring a backup hotspot. Give door staff access ahead of time: you can add someone with door-only permissions so they can scan without seeing anything else.

Afterwards, compare the scan count with tickets claimed. That number is your show-up rate, and it’s exactly what you’ll need to plan the next one. The check-in page has more on the scanner, and if you’re working with a small crowd, see selling tickets for small events.