Free-to-Attend Meals
Some meals should be free to attend… and now they can be, with OpenSeat's recent platform update
Today we are excited to announce a new feature on the platform which some of you may have seen already — free to attend meals.
So, how can you make the most of this new feature? We’ve put together several ways to help you connect, grow your social circles, and create memorable experiences of meal-sharing.
Make an event out of dinner with your inner circle
With the new free-to-attend feature, OpenSeat enables you to ‘make an event’ out of something that is usually more informal with close friends, family or colleagues — those for whom you feel it would be inappropriate to ask to pay to attend. This is a great way of formalising the invite to finally bring everyone around the table.
When creating these events on the platform, they would naturally be ‘Private’ - just share the event URL with your desired guests.
Make your inner circle bigger
Beyond inviting close friends and family to a meal event, because OpenSeat has a formal invite/RSVP that can be shared digitally, it’s extremely easy to open up your seats to friends of friends or those in the periphery of your social circle who you’d like to get to know better.
Just ask your inner circle to share the invite, or send out an invite to that person who you’ve wanted to get to know better but never found an easy way to do so. With a digital invite to a public meal, there’s far less social pressure to accept. Just imagine being the recipient of the following on WhatsApp:
Create meal invites for special occasions
For occasions that centre around a shared meal, the free-to-attend functionality is ideal for occasions like birthday parties, family gatherings, and bring-and-share meals with your neighbourhood, church or sports club.
Some occasions would naturally be private events – if you didn’t know, OpenSeat already has a private meal mode that can keep your meal under the radar. Other occasions would naturally be publicly visible, especially if the meal is for members of your religious community, a non-profit organisation, or a neighbourhood. If you’re nervous about complete strangers joining, as a host you always have the ability to accept or reject requests from potential guests.
Sometimes these kinds of occasional meals incur a cost — so if you need to, you can easily set a charge per seat to help subsidise your expenses as a host!
Nonprofits and PBOs – host meals for your stakeholders
The new free-to-attend functionality allows NPOs and PBOs to easily host meals that help build community among their various stakeholders, whether the beneficiaries who directly benefit from the organisation's mission, the benefactors (donors, sponsors) who make the organisation’s work possible, or supporters and partners from other organisations. In most cases, it doesn’t make sense for any of these groups to pay to attend a meal - or if they do, only to subsidise the cost of catering and venue hire. Imagine:
A monthly status-update meal for benefactors, donors and supporters
A meal for ‘homed’ people in an area to meet the homeless in their community
a Play With Your Food meal for parents and children in a local community
There is also now a way to split the seat ticketing for an event: it can be free-to-attend for those who cannot afford it, and pay-to-attend for those who can. Simply create two versions of the same meal on OpenSeat, and adjust the numbers of available seats on each as requests are made and accepted!
If an organisation wants to fundraise for a good cause, it's now possible to host a free-to-attend meal with a request for donations in the event description. We intend to release a platform feature allowing guests to decide for themselves how much to pay for their seat at an OpenSeat meal – a way to donate for a mission or cause. Let us know in the poll below if you’d like us to fast track this update!
Host an OpenSeat meal at tables in a café or restaurant
At OpenSeat, we know that finding the perfect venue for meaningful interactions isn't always possible. Maybe your home doesn’t have enough space, or hiring an exclusive café venue is too expensive for a smaller-scale dinner.
That's where the convenience of booking a table for free (on platforms like Dineplan or OpenTable) comes in. To ‘make an event’ out of your meal at an established venue, use OpenSeat to fill all the open seats at your table. Hosting a meal at a restaurant or cafe allows you to connect in a neutral and public setting, and because of this, a fantastic way to foster new social connections and bring people with common interests or hobbies together.
It’s up to you whether to make it free-to-attend, in which case all guests will pay for their own meal, or alternately, to set a price for each seat enabling you pay for everyone – your guests can simply arrive, eat, and leave! To do this, you would need to specify what’s on the menu beforehand, describe it in your OpenSeat event page, and ensure that everyone attending, as well as the waitering staff, understand that any side orders from the guests are not to be charged to your account!
Need to do market or academic research? Host a ‘focus meal’ on your topic
Traditional focus groups often create an artificial and sometimes uncomfortable atmosphere for participants. Incentives, typically in the form of transactional and impersonal rewards like gift vouchers or airtime, can feel disconnected from the research process.
An alternate option is to invite research participants to a ‘Focus Meal’: where the worlds of hospitality and research methodology converge. As a free-to-attend meal, it addresses the incentive issue by providing an immersive hospitality experience, centred around the simple pleasures of good food, drink, and conversation.
This not only makes participants feel more valued but also reduces the discomfort often associated with ‘clinical’ data collection for research. Focus Meals can take place in neutral public venues or private homes, with catering outsourced – unless, of course, the researcher happens to have some skills in the kitchen.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we’ve now introduced a feature that expands how OpenSeat can be used as a meal-sharing platform – and we’ve highlighted a few ways to use the free-to-attend feature in the above post. Ultimately, our aim is to make shared meals more accessible, and broaden the options for hosts on our platform. We look forward to seeing how you use this feature to create memorable experiences and bring people together!
Let us know in the comments if there are any other features that you think would reduce the logistical and technical barriers to sharing a meal. That’s what the OpenSeat team dreams about all day long 🍽️