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Photo credit: EventHi

[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]O[/dropcap]ver the last year, mounting frustration festered over dropped events, lost time and wasted resources that afflicted members of the cannabis industry after some cannabis-related events were allegedly dropped from the popular platform Eventbrite. Event organizers reported their accounts were frozen, events were dropped—even some ticket sale purchases were not immediately refunded.

Eventbrite defended its intentions, but confirmed that it will continue to drop events that it deems as inappropriate. “We ticket millions of events each year, including some related to cannabis,” Eventbrite Corporate Communications Lead Amanda Livingood told CULTURE B2B. “To host any event on our platform, our terms require organizers and their events comply with all applicable laws. While various activities related to cannabis are permitted under certain states’ laws, they remain illegal under federal law. This means when we become aware of events where cannabis is included with a paid ticket or registration, or consumption is promoted in the event listing as the primary purpose of the event, we look to remove the event regardless of where it is taking place.”

Photo credit: EventHi

For President and CEO of EventHi, Ali Fahkri, the ensuing fallout was a blessing in disguise—especially for companies that openly embrace cannabis-related events. He saw a need for a cannabis-friendly event website after he experienced a similar occurrence with another event hosting platform.

“We started developing the concept and the idea of EventHi in late 2014, when we had our event terminated from the software company that we were using to manage our event and sell our tickets,” Fakri told CULTURE B2B. “We quickly realized that all event platforms that help event organizers manage and sell their tickets prohibit cannabis events from using their platform.”

Fakhri’s frustration grew as he went to other platforms to post event listings but kept running into the same issue—all because they don’t want to promote cannabis-related events. The company considered Fakhri’s business a prohibited merchant and considered the tickets he was selling as prohibited transactions.

The unfolding events led to an exodus from conventional event sites to cannabis-friendly platforms like EventHi. “These unfortunate incidents sparked the idea of having a centralized platform built specifically as a marketplace for cannabis events,” Fakhri explained. “EventHi’s marketplace would help cannabis event organizers who were having the same issues that we were having, to have a safe hosting platform, while also providing one location to find any kind of event for people who like to attend cannabis-related events.”

“These unfortunate incidents sparked the idea of having a centralized platform built specifically as a marketplace for cannabis events.”

Before Fahkri started building the software, he wanted to make sure that a stable market did indeed exist for cannabis events and that there were enough events to build a business around. To his surprise, he found out that in 2016, attendees spent over $100 million on tickets to go to these cannabis-related events. In 2017, that number tripled. Fakhri also found that companies in the cannabis industry were using events as a marketing channel to reach out to their clients and educate them on their products.

“When looking at EventHi, we [were] built on two main ingredients—the first one was to offer users a safe hosting event management platform for them to publish their events so they wouldn’t worry about issues because of the type of event they were having. The second ingredient was to help connect people together off-line by using technology.”

Event organizers must provide a reason for dropping events from platforms. Unfortunately, Fakhri added, those reasons are very vague and unspecific to the underlying reason the event has been shut down. Not even ancillary cannabis business events are off the hook. “Even if you get permission from the salesperson or whoever in the company that gives you the okay, you still can have issues as these companies are continuously applying a machine learning algorithm (AI), using millions of data points to automatically flag and take down activities that violate the platform’s Terms of Use.”

Another major selling point is the growing amount of financial resources that are willing to back up companies like EventHi. “I have been going around for 11 months speaking with different banks and credit unions, about working with EventHi, and as you all my probably imagine, I got the door shut in my face quite a few times,” warned Fakhri. “But with all this trouble I had to go through I finally found a Credit union bank that was willing to work with me in 2017 called Safe Harbor Private Bank, which is a separate branch from the actual bank called Partner Colorado Credit Union. We announced the partnership between my company and the bank publicly on July 7, 2017 to the State Treasurer of California John Chiang at the Cannabis Banking Working Group in San Diego as a California company.”

Being able to work with a bank like Safe Harbor allowed Fakhri’s business to operate at the highest level of compliance. The bank monitors every transaction that goes into his account while also filing an Suspicious Activity Report quarterly with FinCEN for EventHi.

Event organizers can find resources and licenses through the appropriate governing body that handles permitting and licensing. For example, in California, the Bureau of Cannabis Control issues cannabis event organizer licenses to host a cannabis event. 

Fakhri believes that California is going to be the last piece in a “domino effect” in the “War on Drugs” where we are going to see more states legalizing cannabis recreationally. “Now this journey won’t be immediate, especially with the latest announcement by Jeff Sessions, but it will definitely lead up to it especially if we as an industry can keep reaching out to our political and government officials in all of our states and using the voice that we have been building year after year to state our opinion on cannabis.”

 

www.EventHi.io

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