Step-by-Step Video Tutorials

Hey guys, it's John with Car Show Pilot. Today we're going to go over event creation, adding tickets for the event, and creating a site plan. We're also going to discuss reserved spots in the site plan, where you can sell specific assigned-spot tickets. This can be used either for vendors, or if you're at a venue like a campground or a swap meet show where location may matter more. We'll show you how to link the ticket selection to the spots so that when people check out, they can choose where their spot is going to be. And then we're also going to show you how to set up registration questions and get your show off the ground. Okay, here we go.

On the home screen, once you get logged in, if you already have your organization set up, you can just come in and create your event. Creating an event is pretty simple. The first thing you do is upload your event photo — this can be your poster. You can add multiple photos if you'd like, but it should be a classic poster for your event that gives people information about it.

Beyond that, you're going to name it. We'll call this the Rockabilly Car Show — my imaginary event where we're going to have fun music and very cool stuff going on. Then you're going to pick your date. Let's say we're going to do this over the Fourth of July weekend, maybe on Sunday. It automatically pre-fills 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., but you can always change that — if you want to go earlier in the morning, you can change it to, say, 6:00 a.m. And then give it a description. You're going to want to be as detailed as possible here, but to move through this example we'll just give a short one.

The location name is just the common name of wherever you're doing this. Then you're going to put in the address for the event. You can search the address and it will pull up; once you select it, you'll see it selected on the map. If you're doing it at a park or some sort of open field, you can drag this location to the exact spot of where the event is, and that gets stored with your event. This is helpful for things like having tickets in Apple Wallet automatically pull up when people arrive at the event, and it gives people really good access to where it is. It also becomes important when you open up your site planner — the site planner is going to hone in on the location you pick for this event.

You can give more directions to people. You can get very detailed and give other information about how to park, what lots you're parking in, and how to get in. You can also tell them to review the site plan, which will be published with your event, and you can put in directions on how to get in and where to park.

Categories you can set up if you'd like — these are just tags that get put onto your event and make it easier for people to see what your event is about. They're not required, just something you can do.

Then you're going to configure tickets. To add your first ticket type, you just click into it. We'll call this one Vehicle Registration. Car show participant tickets are a special category, and this category includes vehicle entry for the car show. Whenever you have a ticket that includes vehicle entry, this is where they can have a printable window flyer, and it will also prompt them to enter the information about their vehicle when they register.

You can set a price to whatever you want it to be. Then we have an early bird price — if you want to encourage people to register early, you can give them a discount for the first however many days. The sale start date we're going to start today; the sale end date is going to end on the day of the show at the end of the show. So if you want this to stop the day before or the morning of, you'd change this sale end time, because it defaults to the end of your actual show. That's true for multiple-day shows as well. For the early bird deadline, since I set a price, I'm going to tell people they have until next Wednesday to get that $15 price; otherwise it will automatically go to $20 once we pass the deadline.

For the quantity available, you can set a limit. If you're dealing with a car show that you know has 200 spaces, you can set the quantity available to 200 and it will not sell more tickets than that, so you know you're safe and you're not going to over-register. We're just going to leave it open here. Minimum per order is one. You can set a maximum so that people don't try to buy a hundred tickets at once — that will prevent ticket resellers from coming in and trying to purchase all your tickets.

Then we have invite-only tickets. If you're creating a vendor ticket, a VIP ticket, or even a ticket that's just for your car club members, you can hide it from the public, and there's a way in the dashboard to send invites to those tickets. When recipients click on those invite emails, they'll be able to check out and buy those tickets, but nobody else will see them publicly.

Then the ticket configuration. For the emails, this just has generic text — present your QR code, print it, or show it on your phone at the event entrance. You can edit any of this, and if you decide your message isn't what you want, you can always reset it back to the default. This will show up in the email that people get when they register for your car show.

You can mark whether the ticket is refundable or not. You always have the option to refund tickets whether or not you mark it as refundable, so this just helps with the display of the ticket to let people know. By default it's disabled, and you can handle refunds on a case-by-case basis.

You can also attach these tickets to reserved spot groups — something we'll go over in a little while. This is a way you can go into the site planner, plan out reserved spots, and attach tickets so people can pick the spot they want in the car show.

What we'll go over right now is ticket questions and perks. This is for giving away things at the event, or if you just want to get some information about the people coming. Say you have a t-shirt: you can mark it as merchandise, call it "Car Show T-shirt," and then ask a question like "What is your t-shirt size?" You can make it a multiple-choice question, and make it required or not. Required will force people to answer when they register; if you leave it not required, they can skip it. We'll just add some options — whatever ones you're actually going to have — and we'll add extra large.

If you also want to gather some information, maybe you just want to ask "Where are you from?" This is a popular one — people want to know where attendees came in from for their car show. You can say this isn't multiple choice, it's just text input: "What state are you coming from?" People can type in the state. If you wanted to make it multiple choice, you could put in state names if you know people are just coming from surrounding states. Now we're just going to add this ticket.

So, vehicle registration: it's a car show participant ticket, $20 with an early bird of $15. Then you're going to choose your fee allocation settings. This just decides who pays for what. Stripe charges a fee for collecting the credit card and processing the transaction; you can either pass that Stripe fee on to the ticket purchaser, which is what most people do, or you can choose to eat that cost. If you want that flat $20 ticket price, you can say your organization is going to pay it, and it will show you what the breakdown looks like. Typically, though, you're going to leave it on "ticket purchaser pays." Same with the platform fee for Car Show Pilot — for facilitating the ticket sales and running the software, we charge a small fee as well, and you can choose to pass that on.

You can see an example of a $20 ticket with the fee from Stripe and the platform fee from Car Show Pilot: customers are going to pay $21.88 plus applicable tax. Taxes can be applied by Stripe depending on where the car show event is, what the local tax rules are, and how many sales have already happened in that state for the platform. So you probably won't have a tax fee show up, but you could — just be aware of that. You'll be able to see it when you go to actually check out.

You can save this as a draft, because we're not quite ready to publish the event yet — we still want to set up the site plan and do other things.

This screen gives you a little information about how to manage the event. The dashboard in the My Events tab is really where you're going to go to view ticket sales, communicate with your attendees, manage ticket refunds, and generate window flyers for your participants. You can edit your event at any time through the edit menu — this is also where the site planner GIS system is located. You can do things through the dashboard like embed this on your website: your members don't ever have to go to carshowpilot.com, they can go directly to your site, and you can host our ticket sales right in your web page so it looks like it just belongs on your site. Showtime tools we'll go over in another video, but that's how you actually manage the day of the event — to get people checked in, view their registrations, and find their flyers to give to them. If you want to look at your payment processing, you can go into your organization and look at your Stripe Connect status, where you can manage your payouts. If you ever need to get back to that information, you can just click on "How to manage my event" and it will pull it up for you.

For right now, we're going to edit the car show we just created, the Rockabilly Car Show, because I want to create a site plan for this event. This is a familiar screen — it looks like where we were just creating the event, but there are additional options now that the event is created. You can upload a site plan: if you already have a file that shows a graphic of what the site plan looks like and how to enter the event, you can use that. It will show up in the event listing and people can interact with it. Otherwise, you can use the interactive site planner.

The site planner is a GIS tool. I chose a dirt field to plan on. It gives you tools so you can build your site plan. One of the neatest tools lets you see how big your space is by setting your boundary. To set your event boundary, you just click, and everywhere you click it puts a point. When you're done, you hit the Escape key to finish your boundary, and it will tell you how big it is. This one is 10.8 acres of land, so you'll know how much space you have to work with.

Once you look at it from the satellite, you might already have some familiarity with where you're going and how people are going to get in. So you can start looking around and saying, "Okay, here's where our parking is going to be," and draw a boundary around that. You can pick colors for it and choose the fill so everything shows up appropriately. Same thing when you're done drawing — you just hit Escape and it connects all those points together. Then you can add text on top of this, like "Event Parking," and make the font quite large.

Now we want to show our guests how to get into event parking, so we can use tools like the direction tool. With the direction tool, you just draw, and anytime you want you can hit Escape to get back into the selection tool. The selection tool lets you change things about the arrow itself — we can add a left turn or a right turn, update the arrow, and drag it into place. We'll keep drawing arrows to show people where to go, and you can also add text to an arrow, like "Enter Event."

Once we come in, we can start laying out things like our parking lines, where people are going to be located, and registration tents. Let's put a registration tent in and label it "Registration."

Now we're going to draw parking lines. Parking lines are a way to show how you're going to lay out your event, and they also count up your parking spaces for you. You have the choice of right side only, left side only, or both sides, depending on how you're going to lay it out. Both sides gives you a parking row on both sides of the line you draw, and these get labeled — A row, B row — and 1 through 32. Right side only puts the spots on the right side of however you drag the line.

If I option-drag, it duplicates the row and renames the next one — for example to row D. I'm not sure what the spacing looks like between these parking rows, so I'll put in a measurement line. The measure line is really handy because it gives you actual real-world measurements according to the map. So if the fire marshal has particular rules about ingress and egress and you need at least 30 feet between your rows, you can create a 30-foot row line and option-drag to copy it down, so you can make sure you're keeping 30 feet. This is also handy when you take this to the city for your site plan — you can show them exactly what the measurements are.

Now we're getting to a wider field, so I can't just copy this one down; I'll draw another parking line, right side only, about 30 feet across this time. Let's drag another copy of the 30-foot marker to show we still have space, and drag this one down. We'll shift across this way — maybe there's going to be a stage planned. You keep dragging them down and it keeps incrementing to a G row, H row. This is really handy for getting everything planned, because you'll have a map everyone can reference, and you can tell people, "Yes, this is going to be set up by row G or row H," and everyone knows what that means — it's not ambiguous.

So you can see we have everything set up for these parking lines, our boundary set up for the event, and our event parking set up. And you can see we've actually counted up the spots — in the upper-left corner, there are 311 spots across nine rows of parking. So if you do need to limit the number of tickets sold, this is also a great tool: set up all your parking, see what you can reasonably fit at your event, and then set your sales limits based on the number of spots that are actually there.

The next tool we'll talk about is custom objects, or custom image objects. What's really cool about this is that if you have vendors coming and they give you their logo, you can add images into the system and place their image and logo on the event plan. That's really cool because those sponsors really feel involved in your site plan — they can see that they're actually showing up in the plan itself.

To do this, you literally just select an image you've uploaded, and then you can click anywhere on the site. It's going to start with an image height of 50 feet, so 50 feet of actual space is going to be shown there, but you can click it at any time and make it bigger. So if a vendor is going to be set up in a certain area, you can put their booth right there. Now we have a vendor section set up, and it's not generic-looking on the map — it changes with the size you're zoomed into, so it takes up actual space, and you can see where the vendors are going to be and who the vendors are, rather than just a generic tent or registration area.

Next we'll go over spots. Spots are reserved spots that you can attach to tickets — kind of like a reserved seat when you go to a venue. This is really handy for things like a swap show where the area might matter to somebody, or if they want to be by somebody else — they can buy with their friend and get somewhere close together. It can also be really handy if you're doing a car show at a campground; there are a lot of overnight campouts with actual camping spaces. You can define those spots in groups, and then sell by group attached to a ticket. People will pick their spot, and then they have that spot attached to their ticket.

So we're going to make a spot group. A spot group is just a grouping of spots that you're going to sell — this can be the front row, or all of the spots together. I'm just going to call this one Camp Out. Once you're in the group, I'm going to make rectangles, and I'm going to have my rectangles be 30 by 35. As soon as you have that set up, you can start placing spots. As you drag out, spots are already being created, and they're labeled automatically with the group they're in and the number — camp out four, five, six, seven. You can literally just stamp these spots, however many reserved spots you're going to sell. Again, these can be vendor spaces, or whatever you need them to be — you just call them whatever you want and create them on the map.

You can also make a polygon. So if you want to sell a space that's an odd shape — maybe an entertainment space — you can sell that entire space just by plotting it out and creating it. Let's actually delete this one and show you how the groups work. For group B, we're going to call this Premium Space. There's only going to be one premium space in this case, and we're going to make that one a polygon, so the premium space gets all of this area. Now we have two groups, called Camp Out and Premium Space. Let's save this; it now exists for the event.

Just an FYI on what I mentioned earlier about printing things so you can do planning with the city: if you get to a zoom level where you can see your plan and you center it on the screen, you can print it. Printing it lets you make a PDF document out of the event. This is a really high-resolution document, so even though it's zoomed out pretty far, when you send it to someone they can zoom in with great detail on the entire document. You can use this to submit to city planners to get your permitting for the event, or just print it off so people have it on hand. You can zoom into different sections — if you have people setting up cones for the parking spots, you might zoom in more on the parking spots and print, and it generates at that zoom level so people have the more detailed information they need.

Now that we have a site plan made, you can look at information about it, like how many objects you created, and get information about the tools. In particular, when you select something you can rotate most of the objects if you need them to line up a little differently, you can delete almost any of the objects, and you can rename them. If you don't want it to be called Camp Out One and you'd rather it be called something like "close to Fred," you can do that, and people will see it on the event when they're picking their spots. For right now, we're just going to save that site plan and go back to the event.

Now that we're editing the event and we have a site plan, you can show the site plan on your event details. When this is enabled, it's publicly displayed — people can actually interact with the map and see it on your event. We have a ticket for this, so let's update and publish it.

Once you publish the event, it shows up in the event section on the public web page. (In this case I'm running a local version of it just for testing.) The event is set up, people can register, and they're going to see the site plan. They can take a look at it just the way you set it up — they just can't edit anything, but it's available for them to view at any time. And they can even start purchasing tickets now. Vehicle Registration shows up, and you can see the $15 early bird price along with how long it's available — until June 24th.

If they add this to the cart, they can continue on. It double-checks that they're registering with their correct information. If you haven't set up your vehicle before, you'll add a new vehicle; I'm going to put in my Volkswagen Squareback that I've already registered at other events. Now here are the questions we said are required. "What state are you coming from?" One important thing when you ask this question — especially if it's something where people might answer in different ways, like "AZ" or "Arizona" or different capitalizations — is that you can specify the format, like "What state are you from? Enter two characters." Then "What is your t-shirt size?" — here are the different options we put in; I'm an extra large, so I'll pick that.

Now I can continue to payment. If you're checking out on a device that has Apple Pay or Google Wallet set up, those will all show up for your purchasers, so it's very easy to check out. I'm going to put in my test card number because I'm on a test account with Stripe right now, and I'll make the purchase.

This is what your attendees are actually going to see. They'll get a registration confirmation, and it's going to show up in their email. The registration email lets them add it to their Apple Wallet so it's secured and safe there, and it has a QR code on it so they can use the email to check in at the event. They can also come back into their My Events section and reprint their tickets, or add it to their Apple Wallet directly from the site. Now they're registered — when they come back into the site, they'll see that they're registered, and they can get more tickets if they'd like.

Let's go back and edit this so the map shows up correctly, since I picked the wrong location for it. It should be as easy as grabbing the location and setting it on the right spot. As soon as I update and publish, anything I change shows up immediately. Now when you come down to the interactive map, it centers on where I have that location set, so your users can zoom out, take a look around, and see how they get into the event — they come off Queen Creek, pull into the first parking lot at the park, and here's where they enter. They get all the information they need right at their fingertips.

Anytime you need to edit your event, you just go back to My Events — make sure you're on the My Events tab. There are events you're registered for, ones you've just saved, and if you've attended ones in the past, they'll show up in the attended list.

Now let's link some tickets to individual spots. We're going to edit the event again and add a new ticket type, called Camp Out. This is going to be a car show participant ticket — they can bring a car; maybe this is a Volkswagen bus show: "Bring your VW bus for an all-night camp out." This one's going to be a little more expensive, and we're not going to do an early bird option. We don't have to set the quantity limit, because it's not going to sell more than the spaces we have, so you can leave that. We'll leave the default ticket configuration.

Now let's attach these tickets to reserved spot groups. First you have to have reserved spot groups, which we already created. In this case we're going to let the purchaser pick their spot — otherwise it just assigns automatically based on the order the spots were created, so that's an important thing to keep in mind. You can have it auto-assign, but we're going to let them pick their own spot so they can camp out near their friends. Then we pick the groups this ticket belongs to — we'll just pick the Camp Out group. You can have different prices per group: say we want the Camp Out group price to be $35, just like the ticket price, but the Premium Space, let's say we want to make $75 because they get all of that cool space down below.

Let's add the ticket. Now the Camp Out and Vehicle Registration tickets both belong to this event. We'll update and publish, and when we go back and view this event, we'll see there are now multiple ticket types — a Vehicle Registration and a Camp Out.

Now when we add the Camp Out to the cart, it's going to let us pick a spot. We confirm our information, and then it shows the different available spots. If I pick the premium space, you'll see it's going to charge me $75; if I pick one of these other spaces, it'll charge me $35. You can also expand out the map if it's hard to pick the location. Once you pick the spot you want, you confirm it, say which vehicle you're bringing — I'm going to bring my Volkswagen bus — and continue to payment.

Your spot is held as soon as you get to this point in the checkout. If someone else is checking out, they can't reserve that same spot. This prevents you from accidentally selling the spot twice — the system handles it automatically, so there's no way for someone to inadvertently buy the same spot as somebody else and have you deal with it on check-in day.

Now we're registered. So if someone were to come back into this event, this spot is sold — it's marked in red because I just purchased it, so it's not available for anyone else. But I could select another one: if my friend said, "Hey, I'm in camp out number nine, buy the one next to it so we can be close together," I can come and buy camp out 10 and confirm that spot. I'm not going to go through the purchase again, but you can see how that all works and how people can buy and reserve an individual spot.

That's going to conclude going over event creation. We talked about ticket creation, how to create a site plan, how to do reserved spots for a campout or a swap meet type show, and publishing the event and the different tools that are available. In the next video, we're going to go over the dashboard. The dashboard is how you see different stats about your event, how you create your car show flyers — the window flyers that registered participants receive — and how you can even do gate registrations, so people can come into the event without pre-registering if you allow it. You can take cash and hand them a gate registration, which still allows them to participate in anything you've got going on by scanning the registration code and inputting their information. You don't have to do anything besides hand them a piece of paper, so it's very easy to get people into the car show quickly — which is what we're all after: a smooth-running entry into the car show.

Hey guys, it's John at Car Show Pilot. In our last videos, we went over how to create your car show, set up your tickets, set the address, go over the GIS site planner system, and make tickets that are attached to individual spots for a campout-type show. Today we're going to go over how to manage your event through the dashboard. This lets you see things about your event, see how many people have registered, and get information about it.

If you go to the My Events tab and go down to the event you want to look at, we can see we've sold two tickets — two registered cars for this event, from the registrations we did in the last video. If you click on the dashboard, it takes you into different tools.

The first thing you'll see is the ticket sale breakdown. This gives you analytics about your event: how many people have viewed it, what kind of revenue you've brought in, and your conversion rate for people who come in and actually purchase a ticket. We can see we've sold two vehicle registrations and two campout tickets, with two different attendees because I purchased both ticket types. You can look at the car that was registered, and you can export a list in CSV format. You can also order by different items — oldest first, newest first, alphabetical, or by registration number — and the CSV export respects whatever setting you have.

You can also filter by ticket type, so you can make separate lists: just the campout list, or just the vehicle registration list, and export a CSV of only those individuals. I always recommend creating a CSV export for your tickets anyway. If for some reason you're offline, can't get internet access, or the computer you're doing check-ins on dies, you'll always have that backup — your list of attendees. If you order it by registration number, when you look at someone's ticket you can quickly go to the registration number and check them off the list. It's a really nice backup plan in case you don't have access to the check-in tools within Car Show Pilot.

You can also take actions on individual tickets. When you set up your ticket you can mark it refundable or not, but you always have the option to refund a ticket. If you go into the actions, it pulls open more information about the ticket — what they paid, their perk selection questions, and their vehicle — and you can process a refund right there. Once you process the refund, they'll show as refunded in the list, and their ticket will show as refunded if you scan it at check-in. So if someone messages in and says, "Hey, I can't make it," you have a way to process refunds through the attendees list. This also shows you how many people are checked in, the price they paid, and how many vehicles — so if someone registered with two different tickets for different days of the show, you can see it's just one vehicle registered for two different days.

Earlier we talked about how you can hide a ticket from the public, or make an invite-only ticket. Let's set one up so you can see what it looks like. We'll edit the Rockabilly Car Show and create a new ticket type called VIP. We'll make it a car show participant — you can give it a different category like VIP, and say that it includes the vehicle. We'll call it "My Friends and Family." Let's make this a free ticket — we want our friends and family to get in for free, but we still want them to have a flyer for the show and a real registration. We'll set the start and end date from now until the end of the show, unlimited quantity, and maybe they don't need to answer any questions about their shirt size. Let's add that ticket.

Oh — I didn't hide it from the public, which is exactly what we came in here for. So we'll check the "hide from public / invite-only ticket" box and update the show. Now on the show's public interface, when you view the event as someone just coming in to buy tickets, you won't see that ticket — you'd have to get an email from the person who created the event.

Back in the dashboard, we can send invites. The invite-only ticket shows up, and I can enter a bunch of email addresses, or just one, with a personal message like "Hey, I want you at the show — come out for free." You can also, if you want to text message somebody and you're on your phone, just generate a URL and text it to your friend, or copy it into a different email. This automatically generates the information for them. We'll send that email invitation using our email system, so it comes from you.

Let's check our inbox: "You're invited to the Rockabilly Car Show." Very cool — it's a VIP ticket with the personal message. We'll claim this, and when I come in from claiming it, it shows up just for me and is already added to the cart, so I can just continue. Let's take the Volkswagen Eurovan and continue to confirmation. Since it's free, I don't have to do a checkout — it takes me right to the confirmation. Now this event has me as a VIP registration. Coming back, if we refresh the page there are now three attendees, including the one I just purchased. I show up automatically in the stats and in the attendees. I don't have a photo on this particular one, so we'll show how that looks in the window flyers.

So that's the Send Invites tab, for sending out invite-only tickets. Anytime you want to check your earnings and payout, you can come into the earnings and payout for the event. It shows how many dollars have been transferred to your organization, how many fees have been collected, how much Stripe charged to process the transactions, and the total customer payments received. You can go into your earnings and payout dashboard or manage your payouts directly from links inside it — this is how you actually get paid.

When you go to earnings and payout, you can choose "Manage payouts." If you have money available in your Stripe account, it will be available to pay out — it tells you how much is available and how much is pending, because Stripe takes a little time before the money is available; they have to process it, make sure there are no chargebacks, and get the money from the bank. We give you some information about what we recommend. Before you initiate a payout, make sure you're thinking about your ticket sales and taking care of your attendees. If you offer refunds, we recommend keeping at least 25% of the total event revenue you expect in your Stripe account so you can handle refunds. If you think your event could be cancelled, or that you might need to refund all of your tickets, we recommend leaving all of the money in your Stripe account. The refund system only works as long as you keep money in the account, and there's no easy way inside your Stripe Connect account to add money back into it. I can add money into your account if you email me at admin@carshowpilot.com, but then we have to go through the process of you sending me money and me transferring it into your Connect account. So we always recommend keeping enough to manage your event.

Otherwise, you put in the payment amount you want — say you want to take out $500 to cover expenses for the event. You can describe it and create the payout. Your payouts show here, including which ones you've pulled out before, and if one failed for any reason it'll tell you why. (This is just something I was testing — for example, if you close your Stripe account before you pay it out, which we give you all kinds of warnings not to do, or if you close the bank account connected to your Stripe account.) It'll tell you why it failed, and then you can go into Stripe to rectify it, or contact our support and we can walk you through the steps.

Let's go back into the dashboard. We went over earnings and payouts. Next is perk questions — the actual question breakdown that comes in on your tickets. As you sell tickets, it shows you things like a breakdown of t-shirt sizes and the responses that came in. This is really handy: if you're doing a show shirt and need to order a certain number, you can have a ticket that offers the t-shirt and only sells until a certain date, and then create another ticket that starts when that one ends and doesn't include the shirt. That way you have a complete count of how many shirts to order and a complete breakdown of exactly what people ordered. This also shows up when you scan their ticket — when they come into the event and you scan it, it'll say, "Hey, John registered and asked for an extra-large shirt," so you can pull the extra-large shirt out. For "What state are you coming from?" it gives individual responses and breaks it all down so you can see how many people came from each state. Down below you have information about individual ticket purchasers and their responses, but really you want to look at the analytics questions where it breaks it down — that's the most useful tool.

There's a communications tab used when you need to communicate with your ticket holders. It's a mass email system that takes anyone in your event and lets you communicate with them. You can say "I want to communicate with all ticket holders," and write your message, like "We look forward to seeing you." You can format your message with custom formatting — in bold, "Get ready and bring your car and your smiles. I look forward to seeing you." You can make a list of things: show up early; bring water, it will be hot. If you want, you can also include the attendee tickets and QR codes, so you could send a mass email that says "We look forward to seeing you" and includes their tickets — something that bubbles up to the top of their inbox right before the show. Oftentimes we're selling tickets months in advance, so that's helpful for people. Then you just send the message.

The best part is this communication looks like it's coming from your event. It has your event logo and banner, and shows it as coming from your event name, so when it shows up in their inbox it's something they're expecting — not from "Car Show Pilot." Even though the reply address is our support or no-reply address, it looks like it's coming from you, the event organizer.

The next tool is window flyers. Window flyers are something you generate for your event attendees, and they get generated automatically — you don't have to design anything. You just put in layout settings and sponsor images, and we do the rest. First we upload images — the logo (this is from my friends Desert Dubs in Arizona, who host their Dubfest through Car Show Pilot) and some of their sponsors from past events as an example. Then in the layout settings we upload the event logo. If you have a background image you want to use — maybe you've already done a layout you like with all the sponsor images and your logo — you can upload that and it'll overlay with our text information, so just make sure it looks right with everything else.

Then you pick your layout. Sponsor images can show up around the border; I'm going to make this footer-only, so they go along the bottom and let the event logo sit at the top and look really nice. You can choose a background color — it defaults to white, because printing anything other than white for, say, 300 attendees gets very expensive. You can also change the text color, which defaults to black. You can include information you collected: if you want the t-shirt size or "What state are you from" to show up, you can, and you can change the label it uses on the flyer. You can also choose whether to include this on blank gate registrations — the same settings you use for this flyer can apply to the gate registrations, so someone can fill out their state on the flyer; otherwise it just won't have that line.

You can include other things in the flyer: the event logo, the event details (the name of the event), the vehicle information from the registration — and if there's a photo uploaded, their photo will print on the flyer — as well as a registration number. The registration number is important for things like voting for your favorite car. Once you get the layout settings in, you can preview it. It takes registration number one, lays out the event logo in the upper-left corner, gives the title across the middle, and has your scannable QR code — this is the same QR code printed on their ticket, so it gives information about that registration. Anything we configured to show, like shirt size and state, shows up as line items, and the sponsor images lay out along the bottom since we said footer-only. You can also put them on the corners or across the top.

So we have registration flyers ready to be printed. We just generated a preview, but we can actually generate the flyers: click it and say you want the registered participants. You can say how many you want to do; by default it does them in batches. If you do all registrations, it prints 100 into a batch, because it generates PDF documents for you to download and print, and we don't want to make those files too big. So you can do "all," and if new registrations come in later you can say "print greater than this number" because you've already printed the others. You can give a specific range if your printing messed up 10 flyers in the middle — just put in the range you need to reprint. You can generate by registration number, which I recommend, because as people come into the event you scan their QR code and it says, for example, "registration number 26," and if you have them by number it's very easy to quickly find their flyer and hand it to them. By first or last name works too, but you want enough people to look up by name. I always recommend registration numbers.

Once you generate, the generated files tab now has, for example, three pages with three registrations. You can download it and take a look. I can hit print and have all my car show flyers automatically generated and printed, ready for the day of the show.

The last thing here is gate registrations. Gate registrations are a way to reserve registration numbers so they fit inside the same system. That way, if you're voting by registration number for a competition like best in show, the gate registration system applies even to people who come in and pay at the gate. You'd want to do this when you're getting ready to print registration flyers — it reserves however many gate registration numbers as a bank, so your gate registrations never overlap in number with people who paid to get in ahead of time; they fit into the same numbering system.

So if you think you'll have up to 100 people register at the gate, you'd generate 100 gate registrations. If you think it could be more, put in however many you think might show up. We'll say 200 to be careful, and generate those gate registrations. This is basically just a bank: since we had registrations 1 through 3 already, we've now generated registrations 4 through 203 to use to check people in at the gate.

This is as easy as: someone comes in, you ask if they pre-registered, they say no, you say "pay me $20 cash," they give you cash, and you hand them one of these blank flyers. To get the blank flyers, you come back into the generated files and say "Generate flyers," but this time you choose gate registrations. You pick which batch — I want the 200 I just created — and it generates those flyers in batches of 100 again.

Let's take a look. It has the exact same layout, except we don't have the car show image. You still have the registration scanner, and then you can manually write in the year, make, model, and everything from the configuration. Since we said to include those lines even on gate registrations, they're included on the design so people have blank lines to fill out. When the user is handed this flyer — they pay you $20 at the gate, you hand them the flyer — you just say "follow the instructions at the bottom of the page." They go to carshowpilot.com/checkin, scan the QR code on their flyer, and that lets them input their information. That does two things: number one, if there's voting, you can scan the QR code and see who the person is; number two, if you need to communicate with people afterward — say there was a raffle for a car and someone came at the gate so you don't have their contact information — if you know that registration number four won the drawing, you can still contact them through your communication tools, as long as they went through and checked in. So when they come in at the gate, they scan their QR code on the website and input their information, so you can still contact them, email them, and know who attended your show.

So that's gate registrations and window flyers. You can always delete these files — they get stored in your account. If you decide you have new sponsor images, or the layout settings need to change, you can just delete them, because you can regenerate them. Then you can change the layout settings, replace the logo, or maybe you decided you didn't want to include certain lines on the flyer. Anytime you make changes, you can preview without generating a file, and it shows you how it'll look once it generates. Once you like the way it looks, generate the flyers again — the registered participants and then the gate registrations — and you have your complete setup, so when people start checking in at the actual car show, everything is ready for you.

The last thing on the event dashboard is "embed event on your website." We go over how to do it and how it works in the onboarding, so make sure you read through it, and then you can actually test the embedding right from here. This gives you an example of what your website would look like and how it shows up inside your website. This box is generated by Car Show Pilot, but the rest would be your web page. You can see the ticket registration shows up directly on your site: someone can click to view the event map, so they can just go to your web page rather than come to Car Show Pilot, and they can also purchase tickets. One thing to note: this is a live preview, so if you come through to test it you will actually purchase a ticket.

You add this to your cart and continue through, and it all dynamically sizes on your web page, laying out just the way it looks on this tester. You pick your vehicle, put in information, and it shows up just like this on your web page — nobody even knows it's from Car Show Pilot, besides the "powered by Car Show Pilot" at the bottom; it just looks like it's on your event page.

To do this, we make it really easy: we provide the HTML. Depending on what sort of site you're running — if you have a WordPress site, you can just copy this; if you're running a React/JSX site, you can copy this code snippet; and for the most part, if you're just editing the HTML on a site, you copy the whole thing. You go to your web page where you want the tickets or the event to show up and paste it in. Preview it on your website, make sure it looks good, and then publish your web page with your ticket sales directly embedded.

We have a few options for theming it. The light theme has a white background; the dark theme has a darker background with white text. You can preview what it looks like on a tablet or a mobile device, so you can see exactly how it looks on a phone. If you want a custom size, you can give one — say 300 by 500 height — and it updates everything you're doing here. I always recommend just going with full width and choosing a light or dark theme; when you put it in, it'll give a height of 613, but it will automatically size down, so if somebody opens it on mobile it sizes down automatically to look correct for your web page.

That's it for the embed tools, and I think we've covered everything on the dashboard. If you have any questions, you can always email support at carshowpilot.com. If you want more videos that go over a certain feature in more depth, feel free to reach out and we'll create those for you. Otherwise, I think this covers the dashboard and everything it does to help you manage your car show. Thanks for tuning in. In the next video, we're going to go through how you actually run the Showtime tools — how you check people into your event. It's your day-of operations: how to make check-in run really smoothly, how to give out goodie bags, and how to give out the perks you include with your tickets, like t-shirts.

Hey guys, it's John at Car Show Pilot. Today we're going to go over Showtime tools. Your Showtime tools are something you're going to use on your actual event day.

As a precursor to setting this up, we're going to go into your My Organizations tab. If you have more than one organization, make sure you're on the one you're going to be managing the show for. Most people only have one, and it should auto-select for you.

Down below you're going to see your membership managers. In membership management you can choose if someone's a viewer only, an editor, or an administrator. Viewers are people like volunteers at your event — maybe your friends and family that run the gate check-ins, people that need to view the site plan so they can see how to set things up, or employees of your car club who are getting paid to help but who you don't want editing the car show itself. Anyone who isn't going to edit anything about the account, you'd set up as a viewer.

Once you have viewers, they have access to your event only through the Showtime tools themselves. On the day of the event, you can have them pre-sign in on their phone — just going to a web page on their phone, they can sign in to carshowpilot.com. For this demonstration, I'll shrink my window down so we can see what this looks like on a mobile device.

In the hamburger menu, people are going to select the My Events tab. When you come into My Events, you'll see your list of events. We'll go down to the Rockabilly Car Show. I'm an admin on this account, so I can see the dashboard, edit the event, and cancel the event. But everyone else who's just a viewer will see View Event and the Showtime tools. They can click on Showtime, which gives you a very mobile-friendly interface for managing the car show.

The main tools people are going to use are the check-in tool and the ticket lookup tool. If you have someone running check-in — either at a registration booth at the front of the event or checking people in in real time as they come through the gate — you're going to be on this check-in tool.

The check-in tool is a QR code scanner. You can search within the event: I can look for somebody's email address or their registration number, find them, and check them in that way. But most of the time I'm going to be scanning a QR code. This launches the camera on your phone, or it can launch on a computer if you wanted to use a webcam facing forward, so you could have someone at a station doing it there as well.

Once we start the camera, all they have to do is hold their ticket up and scan it. It's going to pull up their registration number, give the contact information, the purchase information, and whether or not they've been checked in. It finds the ticket very quickly and gives you information about their car and everything else. I'm going to check this person in — I just hit Check In. So this was checked in by me at the main entrance.

Now if anybody's watching the live statistics, it will show that there's a person checked in, how many are pending — in this case it's a test show, so there are only a few people — and it's also going to show if there are any gate registrations. We have 200 gate registrations available. We haven't sold any yet because we haven't checked any in, but if people go through that same check-in tool and scan in and enter their information, that gate registration is also going to show up here.

The nice thing is, once somebody's checked in, they can't reuse that ticket — even if they printed it off multiple times — because the person at your gate is going to scan the ticket again and it's going to say this person's already checked in. If there's no Check In button that shows up, that means the ticket's been used already. So you're not going to be able to check in multiple times using the same ticket, or give a copy to a friend. It'll show when it was checked in, at what time, and by whom.

Once you check someone in, you can just tap Scan Next Ticket. The person doing the scanning only has to open the tool one time — they just keep tapping Scan Next Ticket and scanning. They can call out, say, "registration number three," and the person next to them with the folder of registration flyers can pull out number three and hand it to the attendee.

Now, if we scan a ticket that has ticket perk questions — if you need to know what t-shirt size to give somebody, or any other information associated with the ticket — it will pull that up too. In this case it's the one for the Type 3 Squareback, and it has the perk selections. If I need to grab the extra-large t-shirt for them, I know they've already registered with that, and it shows up directly on their ticket. I can check that person in, call out registration number one so we can pull the flyer out of the bin, hand them the extra-large t-shirt, and hit Check In. Now we know we've given them the t-shirt and they got their flyer. If they were to come back and say "Hey, I didn't get my t-shirt," when you know your process — you hand out the t-shirts at the time you check them in — there's no question about whether you did it.

Anytime, you can look at your stats to see how far through registration you are. Right now we've already checked in two people (both of them were me), but there are three people pending. If you have someone monitoring this, they can just refresh every once in a while to get the updated stats.

That's how easy the check-in and Showtime tools are. It's very easy to get people into your organization — they really only need access to those tools. They just click into My Events and then click on Showtime. It's very useful while you're at the car show. You can run it on your mobile device; it's mobile-optimized to look like an app, and you should stay logged in the whole time and be able to get updated stats.

So that's how you manage your car show with Car Show Pilot. We're going to continue doing this series with other advanced features, so keep your eye out for other videos.