How to Become an Event Manager
Today we’ll show you how to make events management an easy - nay, enjoyable - task by making WordPress do the grunt work for you. We’ll be looking at out-of-the-box WordPress features, plugins and themes and a DIY approach to managing events. Please do let us know if you have more or better ideas.
In A Nutshell
I know some people don’t like to read lengthy reviews, so here are my recommendations in the shortest possible form. We’ll look at all of these recommendations in depth, so read on if you want to know more about them.
If money is not an issue or you just want the best possible combination of products, I recommend using Event Espresso to manage the events and Eventure from ThemeForest to display them. This will set you back at least $125 (more if you need add-ons for Event Espresso), but it will give you one of the most powerful event-management setups you can get without touching any code.
If you don’t need a payment gateway, multiple-day event-specific options or other advanced features or you’re on a budget, you could use Events Manager free version, Event Espresso Lite or Events Made Easy. These are all free and easy to use, providing roughly the same functionality. You might also want to purchase a theme to display your events nicely, which will set you back at least $35, but this is in no way required.
Event Management Features
Before we get to specific tools, let’s look at some of the features we get from an event-management system. You might not need all of these, but looking at them is useful when planning your system.
EVENTS
Obviously, our event-management plugin should at least support events. The ability to create events that are separate from your regular posts is a powerful feature, allowing you to add events to your website’s existing content.
EVENT TAXONOMIES
Regular posts can be ordered into taxonomies - categories and tags. Having separate taxonomies for events (i.e. event categories and event tags) is useful for separating them from your regular content. If you organize Web development conferences, you might want to differentiate between design- and coding-related ones, or you might want to single out JavaScript- and Ruby-related ones. Your regular content might have nothing to do with Web development, so having separate taxonomies would come in handy.
REGISTRATIONS
Allowing people to register for events right there on your website can greatly boost attendance. The path a user has to take from discovering your event to participating becomes that much shorter, which translates into a better user experience and more registrants.
You will also need to be able to manage registrations through the back end. Registrants should be listed somewhere, with easy access to their details.
PAYMENT GATEWAYS
The ability to accept payments online breaks down another barrier between your events and potential attendees. A feature that allows you to accept the widest variety of payment methods would be ideal.
SPEAKER MANAGEMENT
As a software programmer, I don’t like when I enter data somewhere and it’s not stored in an easily reusable way. The ability to manage speakers across your events is a big plus because it opens up access to powerful features later on. This feature should include the ability to add biographies and photos of speakers to the website.
VENUE MANAGEMENT
As with speaker management, having all your locations stored properly will make them ease to reuse in future. If you need to schedule another event at the same venue, there’s no need to reenter the details; just select it from a menu, and off you go.
PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS
Another nice feature is being able to attach companies to events. Companies will often host events, and giving them some recognition for it is a nice thing to do in return.
SPONSORS
Almost all major events have sponsors that contribute in some way (usually with money). They often require you to add their logo in various places. Being able to add the names, descriptions and logos of sponsors for an event would be handy.
NOTIFICATION MANAGEMENT
There are two kinds of notifications we might want to control. On-site notifications are shown to users once they perform specific actions. When a user successfully pays for a ticket or encounters an error while registering, an on-site notification should pop up to let them know what’s going on. Being able to tailor the language of these to your style would be a nice feature.
The second type of notification are email messages to participants. Confirmations, reminders and so on would all be customized to your style.
FORM MANAGEMENT
Controlling the information to gather from registrants is key to finding sponsors and making the lives of users easier. Being able to control this on an event-by-event basis would be best. Some events require less information from users, others more.
COUPON MANAGEMENT
Many events offer coupons for promotional purposes. If you want to engage users beyond your website, then giving coupons for third parties to distribute is a great tactic. Creating multiple coupons for various events would enable you to manage a full-blown coupon campaign.
PRICE MANAGEMENT
Another way to persuade visitors to register is to offer different price options, such as early-bird pricing, student discounts, last-minute offers and so on.
MULTIPLE DAY EVENTS
Many events have so much going on that splitting them into multiple days is the only way to go. Being able to control this from the administration section would be a great plus, especially when coupled with price-management options (such as registration for one day only).
REPEATING EVENTS
If you are organizing a repeating event, you wouldn’t want to have to create it from scratch a hundred times a year. Scheduling and repeating tools would help minimize your effort.
POWERFUL GLOBAL AND MISCELLANEOUS SETTINGS
A great event-management system has to have great global and miscellaneous settings. Settings for creating an events listing page, changing currencies, setting time zones and so on are all part of a complete system.
Complete Solutions
All of the WordPress plugins in this section are paid plugins, but if you’re running a serious operation, then the first two listed here are well worth the money.
The three best plugins around are Events Planner, Events Manager and Event Espresso is by far the best of the lot, but all three are versatile and under constant development.