Due to the on-going pandemic, businesses all around the world have shifted their operations online – including events and payments. In-person events will come back eventually, but until then businesses need to adapt to online events. To collect money for an event online, you need to provide customizable event registration and payment options so prospective attendees can easily sign up and get tickets online.
When you provide different payment options such as PayPal and credit cards for your events, more people will be willing to register for your event and buy tickets. Once people are willing to pay, all you need to do is collect money for the event online.
Collecting money online for event payments is done by publishing a sign up form on the event registration page for attendees to fill out. Attendees will simply provide their personal information, billing details and make payments online for their tickets or registration.
In this guide, we’ll explain how you can collect money for an event online. We’ll also show you how Event Espresso can help you set up registration and ticketing for the event.
Article Outline
How To Collect Money For an Event Online
One of the most effective ways to collect money for your event online is to create an event registration page and provide different ticketing and payment options. This way, it’s convenient for everyone to pay for registration or buy tickets.
All you have to do is build an event registration page and collect money for your event online, automatically. You can also use an event registration and ticketing plugin for WordPress like Event Espresso to take care of everything that goes on behind the scenes.
Step #1: Create an event registration page
The first step is to create an event page for your event. Start off by giving your event a name or title. Try to keep it as clear and descriptive as you can. The title of your event will be displayed in many different places including on the event page, on tickets, and on the event calendar.
Next, enter a description for your event. Your goal should be to describe what the event is and what people can expect by attending. With Event Espresso, you can format your description using the rich text editor in WordPress.
After entering your event details, create a registration form and add questions to it. With Event Espresso, you can build a custom event registration form by creating custom questions.
Questions are reusable once you assign them to question groups. The order of the questions can be modified through drag-and-drop functionality. In addition to this, you can require the questions to be answered before attendees are able to finish the registration process. When you’re done adding questions (e.g fields for billing information), you can add the registration form to your event page.
Step #2: Create event tickets
Now that we have successfully created a registration page for attendees to register for your event, people will need a way to buy event tickets from you.
The good news is that you can create event tickets using Event Espresso.
With the help of the plugin, you can create free or paid event tickets. Individual ticket options are available with Event Espresso allowing you to offer multiple tickets for sale on the same date. For instance, providing VIP Passes and General Admission tickets for the same event is possible through the available ticket options.
Similarly, you can also provide tickets for multiple dates for the same event. This means that if your event is a four-day event, you can create four days of tickets that attendees can purchase for the same event. For each individual ticket you can set a capacity limit so that each day you can specify how many attendees can attend a single day’s event.
Knowing when tickets are available for sale, limited, or on discount can potentially encourage attendees to purchase tickets right away. With Event Espresso you can take care of that with the built-in intelligent ticket editor which automatically shows the status of a ticket based on the event start and finish times, event datetime capacity limits, ticket sale start and end times, and ticket availability. Displaying the ticket status is important for boosting your event registrations.
Step #3: Add payment options
Finally, it’s time to start collecting money for your event tickets and registrations online.
You can collect money from your sign ups by offering different payment options on your event website. The easiest way to collect money for an event online is by integrating a variety of payment gateways such as PayPal or Stripe. This means that attendees won’t have to go to a physical location to buy the ticket or purchase tickets on the day of the event. With PayPal or Stripe or other payment gateway integration providers, you can accept payments by PayPal account, credit/debit card, Apple Pay, etc.
By allowing attendees to pay for tickets or registrations from home, you make it easier for them to purchase tickets from you. While getting all the payments on the day of the event is common practice, collecting money for your event online ahead of time has its benefits, is becoming more and more common these days due to social distancing and contact-less everything!
By collecting money online in advance, you can have a better idea of how many people will be attending your event. It also makes it easier to make a plan for what to do with the money you collect for the event. You can decide how much you’ll need to book a venue, how much to spend on catering, and if you can afford to hire additional staff for the event. Additionally, once people buy the ticket, they are more likely to attend the event as they’ve already spent money on it.
You can also use Event Espresso for collecting money for your event online. It allows you to use different online and offline payment options such as PayPal and credit cards to collect money for registrations or tickets. Event Espresso provides six different payment gateways out of the box. Additionally, you can get up to 17 more payment gateways as paid add-ons.
As an event organizer and small business operator you should expect to incur fees along the way for various services; and payment gateways are no different. Money processing fees in the United States is roughly 3% of a transaction. PayPal and Stripe, for example, have average payment processing rates of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. So, be prepared for some expense when accepting payments online, but also know that you’ll likely make more money and get more attendees by collecting payments for your events when you attendees register online.
Conclusion
To recap, you can do that by:
- Creating an event page with a registration form.
- Creating event tickets to sell to prospective attendees.
- Adding payment options that make it easy for registrants to for the event online.
Event registration and ticketing software like Event Espresso makes it incredibly easy for you to create tickets, set up registration forms, and collect payments from attendees for your event online. With everyone shifting their operations online, it’s time for you to start collecting money for your events on your website. Ready to start collecting money for your events online? Try the Event Espresso demo today!
If you missed out on the other chapters of our 2021 “Ultimate Guide” you can find them here:
The Guide | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3
Ready to start collecting money for your events online? Try the Event Espresso demo today!