Includes an Improved Date and Ticket Editor and Support for Recurring Events.
We are excited to announce that Event Espresso 4.11 core Beta and the Recurring Events Manager add-on Beta are now available in the pre-release channel. We can’t wait for you to check it out! We call on everyone in the Event Espresso community to explore, test, and try them both out!
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As a business owner, you want to promote your products or services to a wider audience whenever possible. This ensures a better place for your business in the future. One effective way of promoting your brand is by hosting an online charity auction on your event website.
This is also a great way to provide back to the community and help make a name for yourself in the industry. You can also host an online charity auction if you’re thinking about launching a new idea or a product.
It can seem quite intimidating to host an online charity auction, especially if this is your first time. However, it’s really easy to do if you have the right tools in your tech arsenal. In this article, we’ll explain step-by-step how to host a successful online charity auction on your site.
The first thing you need to do is come up with a non-profit auction idea.
Let’s take a look at some different types of charity auctions you might want to set up on your event website: Read More
For the past year, nonprofits have conducted virtual fundraising events to raise donations and continue engaging supporters despite pandemic-related restrictions. During this time, organizations learned valuable lessons about not only the best way to plan these events, but also the best tech tools to use to set their virtual events up for success.
It’s not enough to just live stream your event and call it a day. Virtual event tools provide the framework for creating a uniquely engaging opportunity that rivals in-person experiences.
With this in mind, here are three tech takeaways we’ve learned from a year of digital fundraising events:
Although social distancing and masking regulations are easing in many areas, it’s still worth investing in dedicated virtual event management solutions as these events will be popular in the future. Virtual fundraising events are highly convenient for attendees, have less overhead costs because of the lack of a physical venue, and allow you to reach an international audience with your message.
By establishing your strategy for virtual fundraising events now, you give your organization a robust framework to use in all future activities. Let’s dive in! Read More
If you’re thinking of organizing events for your business or non-profit, you might consider building a website and publishing an event with WordPress. It’s the most popular CMS in the world and powers nearly 42% of all websites.
You can use an event registration and ticketing plugin to create an event on your own website with WordPress in a few simple steps. We’ll cover everything including your event website’s design, tickets, registration, and payments. We’ll also explain how you can promote your event to get the word out about your event.
In this article, we’ll explain how to create an event with WordPress using the Event Espresso plugin.
Now, you might be wondering why you should create an event with WordPress?
First, let’s take a look at the other options that are available to you – social media platforms and third-party event tools.
Social media platforms (like Facebook) make it easy for users to set up event pages. They’re great for people that want a simple event page that lets other Facebook users learn about the event, RSVP, and register online.
However, if you’re looking for something more professional, you might come across third-party event tools like Eventbrite. The problem with Eventbrite is that they charge you fees for each ticket you sell. So, for paid events, tools like Eventbrite aren’t cost-effective. Read More
2020 was a challenging year for event marketing agencies. While everyone was practising social distancing, everything became virtual. Events too adopted the virtual route, and virtual events became normal for multiple brands and businesses. Unfortunately, just when normalcy started returning, the second wave of the pandemic struck us and in a much worse and more intense manner. Dealing with the ongoing crisis and conducting virtual events at the same time can be pretty challenging.
Since every brand and business is taking the new means of virtual events to promote their products and services, engaging people more into your event is not that easy.
Through this article, we are listing the best ideas to make your next virtual event unforgettable for your attendees easily. So, without any further ado, let’s dive in right away! Read More
Throughout 2020, organizations had to quickly pivot and adapt their strategies to focus on virtual event opportunities. Events were no longer in-person affairs ripe for mingling; instead, events occurred virtually from within everyone’s private home.
Now, your newfound skills on Zoom and other online event platforms won’t go to waste! However, we can expect to see another shift in how events are handled moving forward. In the post-pandemic world, we can expect to see a shift in organizations’ strategies toward hybrid events rather than solely in-person or virtual.
These events incorporate both an online and in-person element to engage audiences who attend in both capacities. Luckily, you now have many of the skill sets necessary to host effective hybrid events. All that’s left to do is refine those skills and combine the two into an impactful single event opportunity.
One of these skills? Marketing. Multi-channel marketing allows organizations to reach out to their audience on a number of different platforms, expanding brand recognition and making them more familiar with your upcoming event.
This type of marketing is even more essential for hybrid events as your organization will need to appeal to a broad audience composed of virtual and in-person attendees. In this guide, we’ll cover three of the necessary strategies to make sure your multi-channel marketing is up-to-scratch:
Ready to dive deeper into multi-channel marketing for hybrid events? Let’s get started.
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When you host hybrid events, you’ll need to reach multiple audiences at once. Particularly, one that prefers an online platform and one that can’t wait to attend your event in-person. Therefore, you’ll need to create a marketing plan that incorporates the communication strategies likely to resonate with each of these audiences.
The platforms you choose will directly impact the way your audience eventually reaches your event registration pages.
Your in-person audience will likely be more comfortable shifting back to their normal lifestyles, and will be more likely to see information about your event out and about as well as online. Therefore, they may do some additional research, also encountering your online promotion materials.
Meanwhile, your digital audience will likely be more inclined to attend your event if they come across marketing materials as a part of your digital outreach campaign. They should be able to click through your marketing materials and land immediately on the event registration website.
Direct mail is a staple to any effective marketing campaign, and is well-designed for multi-channel opportunities as well. Direct mail response rates are ten times higher than email or social media marketing alone. However, you should be sure to direct people back to your digital platforms.
Direct mail, when paired with digital marketing strategies, offers several advantages for organizations:
When you reach out to supporters via direct mail, don’t forget to provide them with an immediate opportunity to register for the event. Provide a phone number they can call to purchase a ticket, give the web link for the registration page, provide a discount code they can use online as they sign up, or you can even provide a QR code the recipient can scan from their phone. Be ready for these supporters to access your registration form directly from their mobile devices by optimizing your page for this channel.
Email is another staple of impactful marketing strategies, allowing your organization to directly reach people through their inboxes. Plus, you can directly link them to your event site and registration page to learn more about the opportunity.
Segment your audience and send regular emails leading up to your event to encourage as many people to attend as possible. You might even set up an event drip stream of constant emails to generate excitement for the event, shifting to stewardship communications after registration.
According to DNLOmniMedia’s guide, email marketing is especially important for nonprofit organizations, citing the following statistics about how it can impact fundraising in particular:
Organizations’ interactions with social media have changed over time. While the platforms used to simply present posts in chronological order, there is now a complicated algorithm for the posts that show up on potential attendees’ news feeds.
This article says that, “Facebook has started to prioritize groups in its algorithm. This essentially means that your supporters are more likely to see a post made within a group float across their timeline than one made on an individual profile.” Therefore, consider how you can leverage groups on social media sites to promote various activities and events. For instance, invite your attendees to join a specific online event group so that you can reach out to them before, during, and after the event takes place.
Marketing materials sent directly to your potential event attendees, whether by direct mail, email, or even Facebook Messenger, should be personalized to communicate with the recipient. This means addressing them by name and including information in the message that will best appeal to the audience, providing them personalized links, etc.
Tweak your messages to potential attendees by leveraging the data in your CRM to:
When you’re creating your messages for your audience, it can be incredibly helpful to start with a donor letter template to be sure all important elements are included. However, make sure you customize those templates to make them your own.
After your event ends, make sure to analyze the metrics you’ve pulled from the different marketing channels and messages that you sent. This data can be pulled into reports to help you better understand the strengths and opportunities in your marketing campaigns.
The following channels are incredibly helpful for collecting and analyzing the data from your marketing campaign:
Of course, after your event, you can’t change the attendance rates at the event itself. However, you can influence the event attendance for your next engagement opportunity. By collecting and analyzing important metrics regarding your marketing strategy after this event, you can optimize future strategies to even better appeal to potential attendees.
Multi-channel marketing is the best way to appeal to the greatest possible audience for your next event. As hybrid events are able to reach a greater number of people than solely in-person or virtual opportunities, you’ll want to cast your net as wide as possible. Going through these steps for each of your upcoming events, you’ll be able to continue optimizing your strategy for continuous outreach improvement.
Events can be a primary part of your business, or perhaps events only support your business. But, as an event organizer, you can use your WordPress website to accept registrations, sell tickets, offer customer support, and run email marketing campaigns. You can organize in-person events, virtual events, or a hybrid of both.
WordPress event manager plugins help businesses and organizations manage events and simplify and automate day-to-day event-related tasks like accepting registrations, selling tickets, reaching out to attendees, and tracking attendee metrics.
But how do you select the right WordPress event manager plugin for your website to help you to achieve all that?
In this post, we’ll talk about some of the key features you should look for in an event manager plugin for your WordPress site. These include creating event pages with ticket options, setting up event calendars, managing attendees, and sending event emails.
Once you’ve planned and set up your event, you need to attract people to register for the event and attend. To make your event successful and profitable, you need to focus on boosting attendance.
A great way of doing this is with the help of one of the most popular social media platforms, Facebook.
Facebook has over 2.7 billion users and is the perfect platform for getting the word out about your event. With so many users on the platform, you have a higher chance of getting people to register for and attend your event.
With this in mind, in this article, we’ll go over some of the best ways to boost attendance with Facebook.
With virtual events becoming a more popular option for companies, you need to come up with virtual event ideas that can help boost attendee engagement with your brand.
Many real-life events make for great virtual event ideas but this isn’t always the case. Some great event ideas (such as hands-on workshops or trade shows) still cannot be implemented as virtual events.
Since virtual events are more popular now than ever before, you need to think of ways to deliver a good user experience with the tools and digital environment you’re working with.
For this reason, you need to think of popular, trendy event ideas that can make for good virtual events that attendees will enjoy. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best event ideas that make for great virtual events.
Event registration and marketing are tough. There are tons of small details in the event registration process that you have to work out and get right. Plus, the event registration data you collect from prospective attendees can get overwhelming really quickly.
The good news is that, with the right event registration tool, you can make the entire process much less complex. You just need to make sure you’re investing in the right tools for the job.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the features you should look for in an event registration tool.
Event planning and management requires a sophisticated set of skills. There are a lot of moving parts that you need to manage in order to pull off a successful event. Whether you are planning events on your own or as part of a team, you should cultivate a very well rounded skill set. In this article we discuss the specific skills within these categories that you will need to successfully plan your events: organization, creativity, leadership, communication, people skills, finance, marketing, customer service, technology, and sales.