Event Platform

After your Startup Weekend application is accepted, your Techstars Community Support Contact will create your event page where you will be able to add details about your event. This includes your event finances, event tickets, event schedule, and information about the organizing team, mentors, judges, and speakers.

Event Page

Your event page will be composed of the following information: 

OVERVIEW: section to get an overview of your event, reports, and metrics 

• A preview of what your event looks like live 

• A metrics dashboard displaying your event ticket sales and registration numbers

• A list of attendees for your event, (this is where you can check them in)

• A list of attendee responses to the registration questions you asked. 

EVENT MANAGER: edit, adjust and customize your event

• Manage your event payment information, such as your payment settings, platform payouts, event ticket orders, and refunds 

• Manage your basic event information, such as the event location, date, and event description 

• Manage tickets types and registration questions if required  

• Manage your event sponsors and add their logos to your event page

• Manage your event promotion using Facebook Pixel  

• Manage your event communication, such as emailing your attendees and fellow organizers.

SCHEDULE: update your schedule, add your event stakeholders and venue information 

• Adjusting your schedule

• Adding event mentors, judges and speakers to showcase on your website

• Once your event facilitator has been assigned, Techstars will add the facilitator to your page. 

SETTINGS: additional tools like Help, Permissions, Settings 

• Permissions is where you will add your co-organizers to the platform as a lead organizer. 

Event Group

Events are part of geographical groups and each event is assigned by country (ex: Techstars Community - USA). Event groups are managed by internal Techstars staff.

Access to Event Platform  

• You’ll receive an email inviting you to access to your event page

  • From email: no-reply@meeter-app.com

  • Subject line: You've been invited to Techstars' Events Platform 

• Once you login, you’ll be asked to set up an account. Once that’s done, you should be able to see your event in ‘My Events’.

Inviting Your Co-organizers and Staff to the platform 

1. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and select Permissions

2. Click on the “+ Add Members” button 

3. Ensure the person is not already in the platform by searching for their exact email 

4. If they don’t show up click “+create”

5. Add them with the correct permissions:

   • Organizer: can edit the event, manage tickets, add staff

     • Select both Organizer AND Staff for your organizing team.

   • Staff: to be used as volunteers in order to check people into your event, but can’t edit the event

     • To be used for volunteer staff 

     • Select ONLY Staff permissions.

Change the language settings on MeeteR

By default, the event platform will be displayed in English. Individual users can change the event page language by clicking on the Globe symbol on the top right corner of the page. 

Updating Your Event Name, Date, location, Media and Description

1. Click on My events section of your dashboard and click on the event that you are managing

2. Click on the Basic Info tab on the left hand side and update you event name (Title), Start and End date, and place (if known)

   • For in-person events: Add the address of the location (Google location integration available) 

   • For online events: add ‘online’ for the location name and add the link of the conferencing platform that you’ll be using (Zoom, Hangouts, etc) in the address field

3. Click on  the Media tab to update your cover photo. You can choose an image from a curated selections provided by Techstars 

4. Click on the Description tab to update your event summary, contact details and other additional information. It is important to make sure you add your contact details in the description for your attendees to reach out to you if they have any questions. 

Note: Remember to save all your changes! You can preview your event page by clicking on the event name (hyperlink) on the top left hand side of the page.

Techstars Marketing Requirements

• Event title will follow this naming convention: Techstars Startup Weekend [Vertical] [City]

• Event URL must follow this naming convention: event.techstars.com/e/title/date

• Header image will be locked on the template 

• The header and footer sections in the descriptions will be locked according to the event terms and conditions.

See Brand Kit page for more information on branding.

Updating Your Banking Information

Payment Account and Method 

Important: If your event will have paid tickets, you must set up your payments before you publish your event.

In order to accept and process payments for your event, you need to set up your event’s payment account.

1. Under Event Manager, click on Payments 

2. Select the country of your payment account

3. Click on Add Payment Account on MeeteR. For more details see International Payment Account Setup page

4. Choose the correct type of account you are going to link: Company OR Individual

   1. Once you have set up your event’s payment account, your payment account status changes to match the current state of the payment setup. See Payment account statuses for more details

5. Add your Payment method

6. [Optional] choose your Presentment currencies (the currency the attendee is charged or can choose to pay in). See Settlement Currency and Presentment Currency for more details

7. [FOR US based events only] Once this information is added, it will be located in “Payment Settings”, and an “Taxes and Fees” section will appear. (The tax feature will be available for international events later in Q1-2022)

8. [FOR US based events only] Press “add tax rate”. Please note that you are responsible for all local tax laws. MeeteR does not withhold or remit taxes collected on your behalf. See here for more details on taxes.

9. [FOR US based events only] Add your local country’s tax metrics; (You can press auto-populate to add your tax rate based on MeeteR’s auto-populated options). See here for more details 

10. [FOR US based events only] Please double check this rate as you will be responsible for collecting the correct taxes per your state/country

11. [FOR US based events only] Press add tax rate. 

Enabling At Door Payment Option on your event

The Pay at door option will allow the attendee to register for the event and pay by cash or at the venue. Their registration is not confirmed until the order has been marked as paid on the platform.  

1. From the left-side menu, under Event Manager, select the Payments drop-down

2. Select Payment settings

3. Under Payment Options toggle on the Pay at the door option

See here for more details on Pay at door options including Marking Cash as paid, Canceling cash orders and Paying at door as an attendee. 

Issue cash refund

See here for more details on how to issue a cash refund.

Purchase Orders and Payouts

Event payouts will occur monthly, every 1st and 15th of the month

• You can see all purchased orders under Overview > Orders to track your event’s purchased ticket orders

  • See here for more details about your Order status

• Click into each individual row if you would like more details on that specific ticket or would like to refund it 

  • If you need to provide a refund, click on the row with the ticket that you want to refund, and it will take you to a separate page to complete that action

• Funds will automatically go to the bank account that you have entered in “payment settings.” See here for more details on Orders, Payments, Payouts, & Refunds

• [For non-US based events] In the case where an event has a remaining balance below the threshold (the minimum amount of money allowed per transaction), the payment account holder will not be paid out through the standard platform payout (biweekly) schedule. Instead, MeeteR will utilize a third-party service (MoneyGram) to directly transfer the remaining funds to the payment account after the event has passed. See here for more detail

• See Understanding Payout Statuses for more details.

All in-person events must charge a registration fee unless agreed otherwise with your Techstars Supporting contact. Online events have the option to offer free tickets or charge a ticket price. Review these requirements in the Finance section of the resource portal.

Ticket Processing fees and service fees 

A 15% fee will be added to each ticket. This fee is standard and helps MeeteR to provide us with software, equipment, services, and support for event management. This is so that the organizer does not have to pay for these fees. Due to legal requirements, we must show the breakdown of the fees on the MeeteR platform. 

 You can view the breakdown of fees on the Ticket price detail page:

1. Click on tickets in left hand menu

2. Click on a paid ticket 

3. Click on preview 

4. Opens a pop up with the breakdown with the calculated fee (15% of the ticket price)

Create/ Edit ticket types

1. Click on the Tickets tab to edit/ create ticket types 

2. To preview existing ticket type or create registration questions, click on the entire row

   • Make sure to pair your registration questions with your ticket types

   • Scroll down to the Questions section and click “Edit” 

   • Click on “Add Question” to add all the required questions

   • You can rearrange the order of the questions by dragging and dropping them

3. To create a new ticket type, click on + Create button on the top right corner

Coupons and discount codes

• Coupon codes are a great way to promote events with a discount by reducing the amount charged to attendees for one-time payments. They can be applied to specific events during the checkout process.

• Discount codes are customer-shareable codes created on top of coupons and can be shared directly with your attendees. 

• For example, two promotion codes, FALLPROMO and SPRINGPROMO, are both generated from the same 25% off coupon, which must be generated first.

To Create a Coupon Code:

1. On the left-hand side navigation, in the section, select Event manager > coupons

2. To create a discount code, select “+ create new” and fill in the coupon fields 

3. After fields have been completed, select Create.

To Create a Discount Code:

To create a discount code, you must create a coupon code first.

1. After you have created a coupon code, select the code

2. In the Promotion Codes section, select “+ Add a promotion code”

3. Complete the “Add new promotion code” fields, select Save

4. The code name can be shared and redeemed.

See Creating a Coupon for more details.

Registration questions

Some default registration questions have been created for your event. Registration questions give organizers the ability to efficiently ask attendees questions and to collect and track important attendance details. 

See here for more details on how to create your registration questions.

NOTE: Once the registration questions are created, you will need to add the registration questions to each ticket by pressing on the + button under the “Ticket” column. See this video for more details.

Viewing and exporting registration question responses

1. Navigate to the Manage Event page of the specific event that needs a registration question added

2. On the left-hand navigation, in the Event Manager section, select Responses

3. You can filter guest responses by the Filter button

4. An additional option is to export your attendee list. Click on the Export button – all of the responses to your event’s registration questions will be compiled into a CSV or Excel file. See here for more details. 

Watch this video on how to export and view your attendee responses in a spreadsheet.

Event sessions allow you to build one-day or multi-day events to bring your attendees the ultimate event experience. 

Templates of the event sessions have been created for your event. You can manage and create new sessions under the Schedule section. 

See this Creating a new event session article for more details.

Global Sponsors 

Our three global sponsors GoDaddy Registry, Google for Startups and Miro have been added to your event page. Read more about them here. 

Adding Sponsors and Collecting funds  

1. Under the Event Manager > Sponsors, click on + New Sponsorship

2. Start typing in the name of your new sponsor and click create new

3. Add all the new sponsor information 

   • Note: all fields listed there are required including the logo 

4. Assign this sponsor a tier (or select none), enter in their contribution amount and/or any additional notes

   • If it is in-kind sponsorship, please select $0.00 and choose “None” for tier

   • Global tier is only for sponsors who support all Techstars Startup Weekends 

   • The sponsor notes and contribution amount will not show up on the public facing website.

1. Head to Schedule and click on Mentors OR Judges OR Organizers tab

2. First check that the person is not already in the system by typing their full email address.

3. If the person is not there, click on +Create New

4. Fill all their personal information

5. Click create

6. Click on the three dots on the right to invite them to the platform 

7. An invitation from MeeteR will be sent to that person directly. You can resend an invite if necessary

8. Once an organizer or invited guest has been added to the platform and is in active status, you will no longer be able to edit that person’s profile

   • You are only able to edit profiles of people that are in inactive or invited status 

   • Profiles will appear on your event website, even if they’ve not been completed on the platform.

You can draft an email to your mentors, judges and co-organizers and attendees that have signed up for your event through the platform. This is great for letting your stakeholders know if event details have been adjusted, the session description has been updated, or any other pre or post-event announcement.

Emailing your attendees, mentors, judges and co-organizers: 

1. Go to your Manage Event page of the specific 

2. On the left-hand side navigation, in the Event Manager section, select Communications

3. Select which group you would like to email (i.e. attendees, speakers, etc.)

4. Select the contact you would like to email by clicking the checkbox next to their name

5. Complete Subject and Message field

6. Select Send Email.

Marking Event Winners

Remember to add information about the winning teams from your event. These people will be showcased on the website as the winners of the Startup Weekend pitch competition. 

1. Under Schedule click on Event Winners tab

2. Click on +Create New  

3. Fill in all their personal information including the winning team as their company

4. Continue to add all the people associated with the top three winning teams 

Publishing your event page

1. Log in to your Account

2. Check that all the basic information, tickets and banking details have been correctly set up

3. Click on the “Publish” button

4. The event page is now Live

IMPORTANT: If you need to postpone or cancel your event, please let your Community Support Contact know before making any changes to your event page. 

Unpublishing your event page

• Unpublishing an event will remove the page from public listings

• The status will change to draft  

• You will still be able to edit the page and republish the page again once you’re ready. 

Postponing your event

Before postponing your event:

• Review Startup Weekend Refund policy

• Review the platform Refund Policy

• Determine if you will have a new date in place

• Determine if a refund will be issued to Attendees

See here for more details on how to postpone your event on MeeteR.

Canceling your event page

• Canceling an event will remove it from public listings and change its status to cancelled

• All information on the page will be archived, and no future changes can be made to the page. 

• Canceled events cannot be republished.

NOTE: The event page status can only be unpublished or canceled once all orders have been refunded. See Issuing refund for more details on providing refunds.

Startup Weekend Refund Policy

Techstars Startup Weekend recommends that organizing teams typically honor refunds up to 72 hours before the event kickoff (If your event is on a Friday, then refund requests would need to be submitted by Tuesday night at the latest).

We do not recommend that our organizers offer refunds within 72 hours of the event starting due to the need to pre-purchase event essentials like catering and supplies. If tickets are not eligible for a refund, we strongly suggest that participants pass on their ticket to someone else who could benefit from the opportunity. If there are any participant refund requests after this period, these must be dealt with by the organizing team directly. The event platform by MeeteR will reimburse tickets up until 72 hours prior to the event, but not after that time. 

In the instance of an event cancellation or postponement, the event platform by MeeteR will be responsible for refunding 100% tickets for the organizing teams who are using the platform for payment processing. Where teams do not use MeeteR’s payment processing system (but rather collect the funds directly themselves), the sole responsibility for reimbursing participants for refund requests lies with the organizing team. 

Issuing a refund

IMPORTANT: Refunds can only be issued while your event is live and if the order has not yet been paid out. Paid-out orders may only be refunded as Cash and must be organized outside MeeteR. See Issuing a cash refund for a paid-out order for more details.

The attendee can request for a refund directly via their My Orders page, or the organizer can refund on their behalf directly through the dashboard.

When the attendee requests refunds directly from their Order Details page, the organizer does not need to take any actions to approve the refund request.

To provide a refund through the dashboard, you will need the attendee’s Name and Order ID#.

When you process refunds, the following will apply:

• Refunds are processed to the same payment method that was used to pay for the order. Refunds cannot be processed to a different card or bank account.

• Refunds are issued in the same currency that was used to pay for the order (i.e. if the customer paid in USD, then they receive a refund in USD)

Refund process options:

• Issuing a full refund

• Issuing a partial refund

• Issuing a cash refund 

• Issuing a cash refund for a paid-out order

Platform Tips and Tricks: 

• To preview your event, click on your event title on the top left of your screen which should appear in blue or click the Overview > Preview 

• Head to Event Manager > Marketing to add a Facebook pixel

• Edit your location once your in-person venue is confirmed or you know your online event hosting platform

  • Go to Event Management > Edit Details > Description

  • Find ‘Place’ and click ‘Edit’ to the right

  • You’ll have a Placeholder location - change this to ‘Location’

  • Name your location (example, ‘Startup Headquarters Building’)

    • For in-person events: Add the address of the location (Google location integration available)

    • For online events: add ‘online’ for the location name and add the link of the conferencing platform that you’ll be using (Zoom, Hangouts, etc) in the address field

• Location is different from ‘Places’ on the event platform 

  • ‘Location’ is where your event is being held

  • ‘Places’ are where sessions of your event are occuring. (This feature is only needed if you are running multiple sessions in different locations other than your main event location)

• You can make your event private in your event page settings. (A private event is only accessible if the URL is shared)

• ‘Tracks’ only relates to Startup Week events, and can be dismissed for Startup Weekend events.

• If you have questions about the event platform, please reach out to help@techstars.com for assistance.

We greatly value your feedback - please review our event platform here. (Scroll down in the document to find instructions of how to review on either Captera or G2; whichever works best for your region).  

1. Hosting an event

• How to create a classic event

• Understanding your Event Status

• How to assign Event-level roles: Event Admin, Event Organizer, or Event Staff

• Best practices for Place type

• What are Sessions and when should I use them?

• How to create a new Session

• How to email your Attendees

• How to create an Event Label

• How to edit or delete an Event Label

• How to create Registration Questions for your event

• How to add Registration Questions to your tickets

• How to view Registration Question Responses

• How to transfer your ticket to another attendee

• How to view and send Receipts on Orders

• How to add Sponsors to your event

• Creating a Coupon

• Creating a Promo Code

• At-door payments 

• Postponing an event

2. Basics: Payments

• How to set up and enable payout methods at a per event-level

• International Payment Account Setup

• Settlement Currency

• Presentment Currency

• Payout funds below Threshold

• Understanding Payout Statuses

• Understanding Order status

• Taxes

• Issuing a full refund

• Issuing a partial refund

• Issuing a cash refund

• Issuing a cash refund for a paid-out order

3. For Attendees

• How to manage your event schedule/agenda

• How to transfer your ticket to another attendee