How FORGE Went From a Standing Start to a Year-Round Community Platform — Without Giving a Penny to Eventbrite
A networking series where ticket sales fund charities, not platform fees. ForgeLink runs the lot: ticketing, payments, check-in, badge scanning, delegate networking and sponsor reporting, in one platform.
The starting point
Before
FORGE started with a clear ambition and an equally clear problem.
A group of partners with established businesses had come together to build something worth building: a networking event series with real substance behind it, where ticket sales funded charitable causes rather than lining someone else's pockets. Before the first event had even happened, they knew exactly what they didn't want.
- They didn't want to hand a cut of every sale to a third-party ticketing platform.
- They didn't want a digital experience bolted on as an afterthought.
- They didn't want something that only existed on event day and went quiet in between.
The ambition was always bigger than "just an event". The question was how to build it that way from the start.
Why not Eventbrite
The Problem With the Obvious Solution
The obvious answer — Eventbrite, a website, a spreadsheet for check-ins, a separate tool for payments — would have worked after a fashion. But every ticket sold through a third-party platform is money that doesn't reach the charities the events exist to support. And a collection of disconnected tools doesn't build a community. It just runs an event.
FORGE needed one thing that did all of it. Ticketing, payments, check-in, badge scanning, delegate networking and sponsor reporting — from the first booking to the last follow-up message, and everything in between.
One platform, whole journey
What We Did
ForgeLink handles the entire journey in a single platform.
Every event gets its own public landing page — speaker line-up, agenda, venue, pricing and a booking form that opens without leaving the page. No separate website needed. Staged speaker announcements give the team a fresh reason to post every time a new name drops, and every page is built for sharing, with proper Open Graph images so links unfurl cleanly on LinkedIn and WhatsApp.
Card payments run through SumUp and go directly into the event partner's merchant account. No per-ticket charges to a third party. More money reaching the causes the events are designed to support.
Two people meeting and exchanging cards used to be a moment that disappeared. Now it is measurable, and it lasts.
On the day, badge scanning turns that moment into something that survives the event. A delegate scans a badge and lands on that person's FORGE profile with a single button that drops a vCard straight into their phone. The connection is made and it's kept.
For sponsors, that data changes the conversation entirely. Real turnout figures, real badge scan volumes, real proof of who connected with whom. Not a promise of visibility — evidence of it.
And underneath all of it, a background reconciliation job runs every ten minutes to make sure nobody ever pays without receiving their ticket. Abandoned checkouts are flagged for follow-up. Free events skip payment entirely with no friction at all.
The platform
What ForgeLink Does
ForgeLink turned us from an event partnership into a community platform. We can prove exactly what happens at every event, keep people connected between them and sell sponsorship with real data behind it. It's changed how we think about the whole programme.
Paul Gammond — Founding Partner, Societas Capital
Where it landed
After
FORGE now has everything it needs to expand from its first event into a year-round membership platform. More events, more delegates, more sponsors — all running through one system, with every ticket sale going further because none of it is being skimmed by a platform that has no stake in the outcome.
What this was
The Takeaway
This wasn't a website with a booking form stuck on the side. It was a platform built from the first day for what the business intended to become — which is why FORGE could go from a standing start to a year-round community without rebuilding anything along the way.
If you are building something new and the obvious tools would take a cut of it, this is the alternative.