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Payments for Stitch Events & Activities
Setting up attendance fees for your activity
Setting up attendance fees for your activity

How to create an activity that requires attendees to pay prior to attending

Andrew Dowling avatar
Written by Andrew Dowling
Updated over a week ago

For an overview of how payments for Stitch events and activities work, along with the rules and guidelines for both organizers and attendees, please refer to the help articles in the collection "Payments for Stitch Events & Activities".

Defining attendance fee for your activity

If your account is set up to charge attendance fees at events and activities, Stitch will ask you whether you wish to charge a fee when you create your activity:

Choose Yes to set up the fee for your event, and enter the fee you wish to receive from each attendee:

Note that the use of Stripe Connect to take payments via credit cards means a processing fee will be included in the attendance fee.

For in-person activities, the processing fee is 5% of the total fee, plus a small amount, and is added to the fee paid to organizers. For virtual activities, the fee is included in the attendance fee. You can find out more about processing fees in this article.

Declaring Financial Benefit and Refund Policies

After you have set the fee for your activity, Stitch will ask you to clarify a couple of items so that attendees are fully aware of the relevant details for the event.

For an in-person activity, Stitch will ask you to declare whether:

  • You are receiving a financial benefit from the activity

  • Fees for the activity will adhere to Stitch's standard refund policy, or whether you would like to nominate your own refund policy for the activity

For a virtual activity, Stitch will only ask about your refund policy. (All virtual events provide some part of the attendance fee to the organizer, unlike in-person events where the organizer may simply be collecting payments from attendees to pay to a venue.)

Most organizers can simply check both boxes and select Next. At this point, the creation of the fee for your event is now complete. You can proceed with the rest of the setup for your activity as you usually would.

If you will be receiving a financial benefit for your activity, or wish to define a refund policy of your own, you can choose to do so by unchecking the relevant checkbox, and then providing additional information under the Advanced options outlined below.

Advanced options

Defining your own refund policy

For many activities, Stitch's standard refund policy for event attendance fees will be sufficient. In some instances, however, you may be organizing an activity at a venue that enforces a refund policy of its own, and you need to define rules for refunds at your activity in order to make sure you don't lose money if attendees cancel.

Some examples of occasions when you might want to define your own refund policy could include:

  • You are booking a venue that requires pre-payment two months prior to the event. If you cancel less than a month before the event, the venue will only return 50% of your payment, and if you cancel less than 48 hours beforehand you lose 100%. You may want to declare a refund policy that states that attendees will only receive a 50% refund if they cancel within a month, and no refund if they cancel less than 48 hours before the event.

  • You are booking a major event that needs to be booked 6 months in advance and requires a significant non-refundable deposit. You don't want to pay the deposit until you have enough confirmed attendees. You may want to declare a refund policy that states no refunds will be given once the deposit has been paid.

  • You decided to add an attendance fee of $5 to your activity not to cover venue hire, but to ensure that only people who are actually planning to attend will register. You may decide to declare that your event will not be giving refunds to members who subsequently cancel.

You are free to define any refund policy you want, as long as it is reasonable, is clearly outlined, and doesn't contravene any of Stitch's Community Guidelines.

To define your refund policy, simply describe it on the screen below when prompted by Stitch. Please note that what you write here will be shown on your activity description, so please make it as clear as possible.

Receiving a financial benefit from your activity

Attendance fees for in-person activities are most often used by organizers who are receiving no financial benefit, and simply collecting funds from attendees in order to pay a venue for an event.

Occasionally, however, an organizer may be incurring some costs related to running their activities, and wants to retain some or all of the attendance fee for themselves. This is fine as long as it is clearly stated in the activity description.

Some examples of occasions when you might want to state that you are receiving some financial benefit for an activity could include:

  • You organize regular dinners for Stitch members, but are on a fixed income and can't afford to dine out very often. You may decide to set up a dinner with a fee of $45, and declare that $4 from each attendee goes towards the cost of paying for your own meal, along with the time and effort you devote to the event

  • You pay an annual membership fee at a rowing club, which allows you to book their function room at a reduced cost. You may decide to declare that $3 from each attendee at the functions you book go towards the cost of paying for the rowing club membership

  • You run walking tours for Stitch members, and want to charge each attendee $3 to help you pay for petrol and other expenses

All these reasons are acceptable and are consistent with the Stitch Community Guidelines.

If you intend to receive a financial benefit from your activity, Stitch asks you to explain the nature of this benefit, as shown below:

Please note this description is NOT shown on the details of your activity itself. It is only seen by the Stitch moderation team when reviewing your event for approval.

Your activity will simply say "The organizer has declared they are receiving a financial benefit from this activity".

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