As a non-profit organization, event planning can be pretty difficult. While the limited availability of funds doesn’t help the problem, a website with the right plugins can be the perfect, cost-effective workaround.
The good news is that with WordPress you can supercharge your non-profit website to organize events, accept donations, and manage volunteers. With this in mind, in this post, we’ll share some of the best WordPress plugins you’ll need on your website to plan, organize, and manage events.
Let’s get started.
Article Outline
5 Essential WordPress Tools for the Non-Profit Event Planner
As a non-profit organization, one of the best ways to get the word out about your event is through your own website. You can use it to notify prospective attendees about upcoming events, manage online registrations, accept donations, share event details, and much more.
Here are some essential plugins every non-profit event planner should have on their WordPress website:
#1: Give
Donations often provide a significant amount of funding for non-profit organizations. By using Give, you can set up a donations section on your WordPress website to accept donations, funds, and charitable gifts from supporters.
It enables non-profit event planners to set up donation forms on their website, accept donations through PayPal, track donation history, and send supporters custom thank you emails. What’s more is that you can use the Give plugin to add and track fundraising goals, set multiple giving amounts, and export donation activity reports.
#2: Yoast SEO
Optimizing your upcoming events for search engines is a great way to rank higher in search engine result pages, reach out to a larger audience, and get more traffic to your website. Yoast SEO helps optimize your site’s pages and posts for a better SEO score.
Even if you don’t have a content strategy mapped out to rank in search results, the Yoast SEO plugin will help you get the most out of what you already have with minimal effort.
#3: Event Espresso
Event Espresso is a complete event registration and event ticketing solution that lets you organize and manage events directly from your WordPress website. It’s perfect for hosting community events, concerts, fundraisers, galas, and banquets.
With Event Espresso, you’re able to build custom event registration forms, accept payments, sell tickets (with multiple price options), manage attendees, and so much more. The premium plugin comes with all of these essential features (and more!) out of the box. And when you’re ready to kick things up a notch, you can pair up the core plugin with a number of add-ons to get access to advanced functionality.
#4: MailChimp
It’s important to keep your audience in the loop about upcoming events and one of the best ways to connect with them is by building an email list. With the email marketing platform MailChimp, you can connect with and grow your audience.The MailChimp plugin for Event Espresso allows non-profit event planners to extend that reach to event attendees by building mailing lists, sending subscribers newsletters, and asking event attendees for feedback using surveys.
When you’re ready to take things to the next level, you can connect your Event Espresso website with MailChimp to add attendees to your mailing lists automatically after they register for your events.
#5: Testimonial Rotator
If you’ve hosted events in the past then letting people know what your attendees thought of the event in the form of testimonials can be a great way to showcase your event’s strong points and attract more attendees.
The Testimonial Rotator plugin allows you to display multiple testimonials with the author of the testimonial as well as a star-based rating system. It also comes with multiple templates to display the testimonial and includes options for shortcode or widget display.
9 Recommended WordPress Tools to Help Every Non-Profit Take Their Fundraising and Events to the Next Level
After you have the essential plugins installed on your website, you might consider using some additional plugins to deliver more value to your site’s visitors, donors, and supporters.
Here, we’ll share some WordPress plugins to help you better manage your non-profit event website and take things to the next level:
#1: Sucuri Security
It is important to keep your website safe from all kinds of cyber-attacks – especially if you’re asking your site visitors for personal information (such as their name, email address, or credit card information). Unfortunately, keeping your website secure from hacking attempts can become expensive pretty fast.
Luckily, with Sucuri’s free security scanner you can scan your website to identify malware and search for malicious code. It also helps you remove unwanted code or scripts from your website.
#2: BackUpWordPress
Taking regular backups of your WordPress website is an easy way to make sure you never lose your data. BackUpWordPress is a free plugin that can take care of your site backups for you.
It’s incredibly easy to use as there is no setup involved and you can simply schedule regular backups to make sure all of your data (WordPress files and database) is covered. It works with Windows and Linux servers and gives you the option to have your website’s backups emailed to you.
#3: Polylang
Polylang is a neat plugin for WordPress that lets you create a bilingual (or multilingual) website. It lets you add a language switcher on your website that your site’s visitors can use to translate your website’s content.
It supports all WordPress language packs in addition to RTL language scripts. Polylang translates all your posts and pages as well as your default WordPress widgets, menus, tags, and custom posts. This simple, lightweight plugin is a must-have for any non-profit organization that caters to a non-English speaking audience.
#4: SumoMe
SumoMe packs a number of tools to help you grow your email lists, increase subscribers, track supporters, and much more. You can include exit-intent popups on your event landing page if a visitor is exiting without registering, provide discounts, or offer the visitor something in exchange for their email address.
The plugin also lets you fully customize the look and feel of the popups and integrates with the most popular email providers including AWeber and MailChimp. It won’t slow down your site since it loads asynchronously and its many useful features are bound to come in handy for organizing events.
#5: Ninja Forms
Building the perfect event registration form for your WordPress website isn’t always the easiest thing to do. You can use a form template, widget, or even shortcode to publish a form on your site. With Ninja Forms, you’re able to translate your form into multiple languages, control every individual form field, and add custom functionality.
#6: UkuuPeople
Being a non-profit organization, you likely have to interact with your site’s visitors, contacts, supporters and volunteers on a regular basis. A contact relationship management tool like UkuuPeople provides you with data collection tools that help you track your interactions with your contacts and share it with your team.
It will set you up with a contact dashboard that displays and manages your interactions with touchpoints – a history of your interactions with your contacts. From there, you can also view donation and payment information, divide your contacts into groups, view schedules, create tasks and assign them to your team.
#7: Wired Impact Volunteer Management
Non-profit organizations often run campaigns to encourage people sympathetic to their cause to volunteer with them. Wired Impact Volunteer Management is a WordPress plugin that lets you post volunteering opportunities on your event website and manage volunteers.
These volunteers can sign up directly from the website and you will be able to track their involvement and participation. The plugin lets you set up the number of available positions and configure automatic email notifications to be sent when these positions open up.
#8: Jetpack
Jetpack is a powerful WordPress plugin that offers a complete marketing, design, and security solution. The plugin packs a number of neat features including tools to help you get an overview of your site’s analytics and statistics, SEO tools for search engines, integration with advertising programs and PayPal, and social media post scheduling.
Jetpack also provides spam filtering and protection against brute force attacks as well as monitoring the downtime of your website. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this must-have plugin and the wide array of features it offers.
#9: Relevanssi
If you’re publishing a lot of content on your non-profit organization’s website (such as blog posts, event registration details, or donation/volunteering information), you’re going to need better on-site search than what WordPress offers out of the box.
Relevanssi is a free search plugin for WordPress websites that gives site visitors more accurate search results. Its search algorithm is based on relevance and allows matching of partial words and can search through tags, comments, categories, and other custom fields. It also has support to search for phrases by using quotes and will highlight the search term for the user as they scroll through the results.
Conclusion
With the right combination of plugins, you’ll be able to increase the functionality of your non-profit organization’s website by integrating features that take the heavy lifting out of planning, organizing, and managing events.
We shared a list of the essential plugins you need to take your non-profit website to the next level. Hopefully, you’re in a good position now to take things further yourself.
What are some of the plugins you use for event planning and management on your non-profit website? Share your top picks in the comments section below.