This community occasionally discusses how hard it is to get people to RSVP to events, even well-attended events the community loves. I think recent Lighthaven events have a ticket strategy that mostly solves this problem, at least for larger paid events that need a critical mass of community support to be viable. The strategy has three pillars that synergize to encourage attendees to sign up and pay early, then keep those plans.

I was the logistics lead for the first ManifestX event, a one-day predictions market unconference in DC this past weekend. We have a larger post coming that will describe the event in more detail and discuss lessons learned, but I'm promoting this section to its own post to get the word out quickly, as Solstices are being announced. Bottom-line, we tested this strategy and found it very effective.

What I'm calling the Lighthaven-ish ticket strategy (better name TK?) has three pillars:

Significant early discounts to entice people to make plans.
Tickets are sold in tiers, with well-publicized plans that prices will increase as the event gets closer. Tiers can be differentiated by time, by number of tickets, or both.
A generous refund policy until shortly before the event that essentially eliminates the risk of buying an early ticket.

These synergize so well that it would be difficult to implement any one pillar without the others. The early discounts are viable because they're offset by higher-priced tickets later. The generous refund policy encourages people to buy a ticket now if they're reasonably likely to attend, but because of escalating pricing tiers, anyone who cancels frees up a seat for a higher-priced ticket. The price escalations reduce refund requests, because earlier purchasers are reluctant to let go of their perceived good deal. It all fits together.

Applied FOMO

Manifest x DC had the following ticket strategy:

Standard tickets were $65. Early bird tickets were $50, last-chance tickets were $80.
1. Supporter tickets were double whatever regular price we were charging, so $100, $130, or $160.
The tiers were limited by quantity and time. We planned three weeks of early bird, a little over two weeks of standard, then any tickets sold after the refund deadline would be last-chance. Early bird was limited to 30 tickets, and we'd reserved 15 for organizers, speakers, and volunteers. Since our total capacity was ~60, that left 15 for the other paid tiers.
We offered refunds less 5% stripe and luma fees until two weeks before the event, when we needed to print the badges.
1. While we didn't promise this, we also refunded the two who had to cancel after our published deadline, since we had a waitlist and the budget was going well.
2. I regret not refunding transaction fees. If I had to do it over again, I'd offer 100% refunds for simplicity and fairness, at least for the early bird tickets.

We sold more tickets on Day 6 of ticket sales, without additional promotion, than we had sold in Days 1-5 combined. What changed? As far as we can tell it was just perceived scarcity, the Fear of Missing Out. The Luma platform starts showing "Only X left" once X is 10 or less for any particular ticket tier. Once we got down to 10 Early Bird tickets left, they sold quickly. Because Supporter tickets had been pulling from the same pool of 15 as the full-rate tickets, we then only had 10 of those left. They also sold out that day. At that point, we suspended registration rather than dipping into our volunteer/speaker pool while we created a waitlist.

Attrition was significantly less than we expected. Despite encouraging people to buy tickets even if they weren't sure if they could make it, and selling out more than a month in advance, we only had five cancelations. Each was replaced by a more expensive standard or last-chance ticket.

Why this helps organizers

Event organizers have a coordination problem. Most events are only viable with a certain level of attendance. Similarly, paid events always have some expenses in advance, usually significant ones. Even if you can assume your event will clear the Minimum Viable Party threshold, you still need to know whether to rent the big or small venue, how much food to order, etc. Early RSVPs and early money are significantly more useful than later.

Price Discrimination is Good, Actually

There's a common problem in microeconomics: firms with large fixed cots have lower marginal costs than their average cost. Think airlines, concerts, and your cable company. Those firms find it's always profitable to sell an extra unit at just above marginal cost, it seems a shame to turn that customer away, but they can't cover their fixed costs if they charge all customers that rate. The economically efficient answer is price discrimination. Find some way to differentiate your customers by price sensitivity, then charge the price sensitive customers less.

Event organizers have this class of problem. Charging some of your friends different prices than others probably feels unfair. If so, your feelings are incorrect.

Early money is significantly more useful than later money. You can use it for deposits and to order catering. You can place orders for supplies weeks out instead of days out, reducing rush processing and shipping fees. You can comparison shop for goods and services rather than going with whoever is faster. It is proper, just, and fair to compensate your guests who paid far in advance, giving you these options, for the time value of their money. Early Bird discounts are pro-social.

Similarly, it feels great to add a friend who's unexpectedly free to your thing at the last minute. I felt that delight last week when I found out that several people who I wasn't expecting could come after all. But their ticket and their money would have been a lot more helpful weeks ago. They had the option of getting a ticket earlier, you even offered to take on that risk for them with your generous cancelation policy. Do not be embarrassed to charge late registrants the higher last-minute ticket price.

Why this helps your attendees

Like many in this community, my preferences feel inconsistent. I'm often unenthusiastic about trips the night before, when packing or thinking about the stress of a travel day. But I have a blast once I'm on a trip that I've been looking forward to. Often this same pattern holds for smaller local events: I have fun once I'm there, but it can be hard to motivate myself to go.

This pattern held for Metagame. I wasn't sure I'd be able to attend. I asked Ricki if she'd prefer I buy an early bird ticket with a 50% chance of needing a refund, or wait to buy a more expensive ticket once I could make more firm plans. She replied that she'd prefer to sell the ticket, because having the ticket would make me more likely to come. She was absolutely correct, that conversation was counterfactually responsible for me coming to Metagame. My September was busy but I kept that weekend blocked off in my calendar. I wavered until the cancelation deadline, decided at the last minute to go for it. If I had needed to buy a ticket at that point, given how the coming months were looking, the price wouldn't have mattered, I'd have stayed home.

In some ways, this is just a special case of the endowment effect. But unlike overvaluing some cheap mug from a psychology study, I actually endorse this in retrospect. I had a blast at Metagame. I'm glad Ricki's mechanism design successfully tricked me into going.

Please use these tips to trick your attendees into having a blast.

Epistemic status

I am confident in my economic analysis of the pillars I described. I tested these principles by using them to run an event this past weekend, which was successful and finished with a budget surplus. I am describing what I perceive as the ticket strategy used by several recent Lighthaven events (the 2025 versions of LessOnline, Manifest, and Metagame), but I may have misunderstood the exact policies of those events and am not speaking for Lightcone, Lighthaven, Manifold, Arbor, or any other associated groups or people. Do not try to cite this post to get a refund from some future event if you misread that event's refund policy. I wrote this quickly and will likely edit or revise.