Referral Program — Turn Attendees Into Advocates

When someone comes back from a retreat or a kirtan circle glowing, the person they tell first is a friend — not an ad. BrightStar's referral program takes that natural impulse and makes it trackable and rewarded instead of leaving it to chance. Every ticket buyer and every organizer gets a unique referral link to share, and BrightStar tracks who they bring so the reward reaches the right person automatically, with no codes to hand out and no spreadsheets to keep. You don't have to remember who sent whom, and your friend doesn't have to type a promo code at a folding table by the door on the night of the event — the link itself carries that information for you.

BrightStar rewards two different kinds of referral, because bringing a friend to a class is a different act of trust than bringing a whole organizer onto the platform.

Attendee referrals are the simple case: you get a personal link after checkout, a friend uses it to buy their own ticket, and you earn credit toward your next one. Organizer referrals — the Brand Ambassador program — reward something bigger: helping a teacher, studio, or event host set up on BrightStar in the first place. That earns you a standing 20% of BrightStar's platform fee on everything that organizer sells, for as long as they keep selling. Attribution is first-touch and locked to that organizer's account forever, so a later contact from someone else can't take the reward over. BrightStar pays this out of its own fee rather than the organizer's proceeds, so the organizer you referred never sees their payout shrink because of it. The one exception is free Seva events, where the platform fee itself is $0 — 20 percent of nothing is still nothing.

A referral is captured the instant someone arrives through your link and either buys a ticket or creates an organizer account. From that moment, the link is tied to that person permanently — not just for a single session or a single day. That matters in practice: someone might click your link the night of a kirtan, then not actually book a retreat until weeks later, once they've checked their calendar and their budget. Because the tie is permanent, you still get the credit or commission when they finally act, even though nothing happened at the moment they first clicked.

Everything referral-related — your links, what you've earned, and what's been paid out — lives in one place: your BrightStar dashboard, under Commissions. You don't need to hunt for a separate portal or ask someone to look something up for you. Credits from attendee referrals apply automatically at checkout, so a friend's purchase reduces your next ticket price without any extra step on your part. Commissions from organizer referrals go out on BrightStar's standard payout schedule, the same schedule your other earnings already follow, so there's nothing separate to track.

Word of mouth already happens at every retreat, kirtan, and sound bath — someone always asks a friend whether they've tried this before they'd ever ask an ad. The problem with word of mouth has never been whether it works; it's that it's invisible and easy to lose track of. A promo code requires a friend to remember it and type it correctly, and requires you to keep a spreadsheet of whose code did what. BrightStar's referral links remove that friction on both ends: the link carries the tracking, so the person sharing it doesn't have to explain anything, and the reward finds its way back to them automatically instead of depending on anyone's memory or bookkeeping.