Besides typical church services (experiences etc), every church, every now and then, will run an event. These events vary. Some are for specific groups or interests, and others more general. Conferences are a great example of a deviation from ‘typical’ events. Some events required registration and payment. After Setting up a WordPress event website, I thought this post might be helpful for others.
My Event Website Using WordPress – Plugins And Cost
A registration system, especially automated one, can reduce stress for attendees and organizers. Say goodbye to notebooks and (manual) spreadsheets.
What I Used To Create The Website
- As the title of the post intimates, I built the site using WordPress. I opted for WordPress.org, which is the self-hosted option. I did this to allow me flexibility in case I needed it. And, by default, I used WordPress plugins.
The plugins I used:
- WooCommerce
This plugin powers over 30% of e-commerce websites worldwide. Unlike Shopify, for example, you don’t have to pay a subscription to use it. - WooCommerce BoxOffice
A ticket management and registration plugin. I ‘nagged’ the WooCommerce support twice, I think, and I had a great experience. I like the simplicity of this plugin. Exporting tickets, communicating with registered delegates and marking people present was a breeze. - Payment Gateway
How you receive funds / payment. There are many options to receive payment. I used a local payment gateway in my country, but you can also use services like PayPal.
Other plugins on my website:
- Jetpack: this is many plugins in one. I use it because it offers, among other things, security, backups and more. It also helps leverage some of the resources of WordPress.com on your WordPress.org site. (Unfortunately, this post isn’t intended to cover such detail, but this post might be helpful.)
- Akismet: for protection against spam.
- Really Simple RSS: the website hosting company has SSL activate by default. This plugin helps run my WordPress over SSL. For more on this see this great post by Eric.
How Much It Cost
- WordPress – Free
- WooCommerce BoxOffice – US$99
- Domain – US$4
- Year’s (Website) Hosting – US$7
- Theme – US$0 (I used a free theme by Automattic)
- Man hours – Unfortunately I didn’t keep track of the man hours I spent on the website. It wasn’t a lot of time as I did little custom or extra work. Most of what I used was out-the-box. I didn’t have a lot of time. I settle for an informative and functional registration and payment website.
Total cost – US$110 (excluding man hours)
Why A WordPress And Woo Commerce Setup?
If you don’t have a church management system, or one that does a great job of registering and paying, this is an alternative. Also, if your church management system requires event attendees to be pre-loaded on the system it could create challenges. Hence an independent event website might be a plan.
One of the reasons to set up your own website is to have instant access to the registration funds. Platforms like Eventbrite, only pay out after events. I assume this is a way of protecting attendees, but it is not always the best for (legit) event organizers. Access to funds post events is not always practical for churches. A lot of us would know the pain of running an event on a shoestring budget.
In case you need to create unique functions on your website, WordPress gives you more control.
WooCommerce helped me set up a shop on our Facebook page. Setting up Pixel in Facebook allowed me to set up promotions on Facebook. People started the registration on Facebook and completed checkout on the event website. You can also set up different payment methods.
Going the WordPress route also made the blogging side of things for the event much easier. Most users, both technical and non-technical, were familiar with WordPress. This meant they didn’t need to learn anything new.
Setting up my event website using WordPress was a fairly painless exercise for me. This could be due to the fact that I’m already familiar with WordPress (have been using it for about ten years now).
You?
Have you set up any event websites? Do you mind sharing what you used, why and how it worked for you?
Peter says
Out of curiosity, can you share what your registration site ended up looking like? Did you have to handle different sets of options for registration or a simple “register and be done” type form? I’m considering solutions for event registration for future events for our troop and perhaps beyond, but there just aren’t any “great” choices available. The best we’ve really found so far has been using Jotform and capturing the appropriate custom choices.
Blessing Mpofu says
I hope I understand your question Peter… My event needed registration with payment. So, the registration process completed with checkout / payment. That’s why WooCommerce BoxOffice was an option. If you all you wanted / needed was just a sign up form and you didn’t want to spend any money on WooCommerce extensions like BoxOffice, I’d recommend checking out Gravity Forms, Typeform, and even Google forms.
You’d be able to export registrations into a single spreadsheet for check-in at the event. Hope I understood the question and answered accordingly, otherwise, let me know if you need further clarification. All the best.
Peter says
I need something w/ a set of options that can be selected, but only until a certain amount – also looking for those options to only be available based on the age range of the person registering. Something like a Camp w/ different class/session offerings during the day, but limited slots per session. Add-ons for shirts and such, but mostly registrations w/ some custom questions.
Do you have screenshots you can share of your site? BoxOffice might be similar to what I am looking for, but hard to say for sure. I’ve heard good things about WooCommerce, but hadn’t played with it too much overall.
Blessing Mpofu says
Unfortunately, I didn’t get screenshots for the site when it was up. From the setup I had / described in this post, this is what I would do.
I’d create separate tickets (BoxOffice) for the different age groups. The cool thing about WooCommerce BoxOffice at setup is that you can create the fields you want to have in the registration process, which will be fields in the exported csv file. Combined with WooCommerce people can then add purchases e.g. t-shirts and other swag to their registration process and pay for everything at checkout.
You can choose the number of people you want to register and pay once at checkout. This would be great when registering families etc.
When it comes to choosing slots per session, I’d personally keep things as simple as possible. For instance, I’d get people to choose what class / session they want to attend in each session in the registration process. I, personally, would create the answers to the questions as fields in the registration process.
Otherwise if you need more complex computations you might need to work on some code. Unless of course, there’s a solution available that specifically already addresses that. I’m not aware of any at the moment. (I didn’t look for one).
The WooCommerce support is also great in answering questions before you purchase extensions.