No fees, nothing up front is a fair pitch — we make it ourselves. But an organizer who accepts it without questions is pricing their real contribution at zero, and it is not: a partnership puts someone else in front of your attendees, wearing your trust. That trust took years; a bad partner can spend it in one weekend. Free to start still deserves diligence.
The five questions
- What do my attendees see and pay? Get the actual prices checked against the open market. A partner marking your attendees up is spending your trust as their margin.
- What happens when a booking breaks? Names and hours, not assurances. Your box office will get the angry email either way — know where it forwards.
- What data leaves, and where does it go? The attendee gave their details to you. Any partner touching them should be contractually barred from reselling or cold-marketing that list.
- How do I verify the money? Transparent booking reports you can audit, not quarterly summaries. You earn around 6–8% of every booking made through your page — the reporting should show your take on each one.
- How do I leave? An off switch, exercisable without penalty. The partner's confidence in their own performance is measurable by how easy they make this.
What good answers sound like
Specific, checkable, and boring. Real prices you can spot-check tonight; a support address with a human behind it; a data clause in writing; a report you can pull; an exit that costs nothing. Evasion on any of the five is itself the answer.
The diligence takes an afternoon. What it protects — the assumption your attendees make that anything wearing your name is worth trusting — is the most valuable thing your event owns. Free should mean free of cost, never free of accountability.
Running the five checks in one afternoon
The diligence is faster than it reads. Prices: pick three dates, compare the partner's rates against the open web — thirty minutes. Support: email their help address with a real question and time the answer — passive, runs itself. Data: ask for the data-handling clause in writing; the reply tells you both the answer and how they treat partner questions. Reporting: request a sample report from an existing event — a real partner has one in the drawer. Exit: read the termination clause yourself; it is one paragraph. An afternoon total, and the pattern of the five answers is unambiguous by the end. The partners who pass tend to pass everything; corner-cutting clusters.
- Do the price check personally — it is the one your attendees will do, and the one partners most hope you skip.
- Save the answers: diligence documented once becomes the renewal checklist later.
- Re-run prices quarterly after launch; drift is more common than launch-day markup.