Archive for the ‘Event Planning’ Category

Protecting your events against spam

Monday, August 20th, 2012

It can happen at any time.  You’ve opened your event for registrations and you are suddenly inundated by obviously fake users and incomplete transactions.  Spam is everywhere (and we don’t mean the food).  It’s in your inbox, it’s in your comments, and it’s in your events.

Where does it come from?  A lot of spam — particularly the type of spam that fills up contact forms (and event registration forms) — comes from a specific kind of script designed to identify potential security holes in your site like this one.  These types of applications are designed for admins to check their site before deploying it live, but in the wrong hands can be run on a site, or a series of sites, automatically, and — at the very least — inject huge dumps of worthless code into your database and — at worst — obtain database access and the ability to manipulate the data stored on your server.  There are a few different ways you can protect yourself, your data and your event site against spam registrations.

The first option is the best solution and most recommended: Enable the mod_security module on your Apache installation. Most spam registrations come from bots or scripts that crawl a site looking for forms and fill them with data remotely (e.g. it’s not actually done by a human visiting your site, but a machine that is executing your code without ever actually hitting your site). The mod_security module protects your site against these kinds of remote submissions. If you do not have access to configure what Apache modules are enabled or disabled on your server, you might ask your webhost if it is possible to enable it. In my opinion, this should be on by default on all Apache servers (and IIS and nginx — which it also supports).

If enabling mod_security is not a possibility in your environment — either because you do not have access to your Apache configuration or your host is not able or willing to enable or install the mod_security package — you can use reCAPTCHA to require that attendees fill out a CAPTCHA form before their registration is recorded. reCAPTCHA is part of an initiative to digitize books, newspapers and radio recordings.  Every time you enter a response in a reCAPTCHA form, you are helping the software identify real words that a computer was unable to read.  Since the words that appear in a reCAPTCHA form have already failed sophisticated OCR technologies to translate them into text, spam bots aren’t likely to be able to read it, either, so you’re protecting  your forms when you require a CAPTCHA for verification.  While this can be arguably somewhat more annoying to the user, it will thwart any bot attempt to fill the form with garbage.  For more information about how reCAPTCHA works, check out the reCAPTCHA site.

You can also use the Event Espresso WP User Integration plugin to make all your events member-only and require your users to log in using the built-in WordPress user registration system. Even if you do not have some form of human verification on your site’s registration process (this is not recommended, especially if you’re already getting hit by spam registrations), the additional step that a bot would need to go through of registering for a site, and then logging in before it is able to register for an event means that you are safeguarding your events against a potential attack by a script. The benefit of this over using reCAPTCHA is that there are a number of options in addition to reCAPTCHA in which user registrations must verify that they are not a bot by answering an admin-defined questions like “what color is the sky” or “what is two plus four” as opposed to trying to decipher a hard-to-read CAPTCHA image.

Event Espresso runs sanitization and data validation checks on all information that is stored in the database.  This means that anything one of these scripts injects gets cleaned before being stored in the database, which, in turn, means that none of the data that gets dumped your system will be likely to cause any real damage to your site or expose any hidden passwords or personal information.  However, dealing with a site that has been hit by thousands of fake user registrations can be tedious and time-consuming.  Protect yourself, and your valuable time, by checking with your host about whether mod_security is enabled.  If you are seeing registrations to your events that are obviously fake, take one of the precautions mentioned above and save yourself a lot of headache.

For more information, head over to the support document for anti-spam and reCAPTCHA.

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Powering 80,000 Registrations & 900 Events for Social Media Week

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Event Espresso is a major technology sponsor of Social Media Week. Event Espresso provided core registration functionality and developed powerful user management controls. A major portion of our involvement was making sure the roles and permissions, with the addition of regional manager permissions, set up to work across the network of 12 different sites/event cities.
Seth worked with them personally to make sure that the development went smoothly. Social Media Week had one designer and two developers working on an integrated theme.

About Social Media Week
Social Media Week (SMW) is a global platform that connects people, content, and conversation around emerging trends in social and mobile media. Delivered primarily through a network of internationally hosted biannual conferences and online through social and mobile media, Social Media Week brings hundreds of thousands of people together every year through learning experiences that aim to advance our understanding of social media’s role in society.

UPDATE:

  • In 2011: 20,000 attendees, across 700+ events, in 12 different cities around the world, from September 19th to 23rd, 2011.
  • In 2012: 80,000 attendees at the first event in 2012.

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Meetup.com Alternative

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Alternative to Meetup.com

Event Espresso customers come from all parts of the world and use our plugins for a wide variety of reasons. A few of our current customers were looking for an alternative to meetup.com. This is what they said they didn’t like about it:

  • Meetup.com is Expensive – Their fees range between $12 – $24 per group per month!
  • Meetup.com is Controlling – Event organizers have very little over their brand (the style and functionality) of their user’s experience!
  • Meetup.com is Too Simple – While simplicity is good for some people, too simple doesn’t get the job done and they don’t have enough of the features to get everything done the right way.

Event Espresso’s mission is “to empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” With Event Espresso, you can be more autonomous and empowered, and create your own alternative to meetup.com. With Event Espresso, you can save more money, control your user’s experience and your brand, and you can get your event registration done more like you want them. We understand there is a place for some people to want or use these type of services, but we certainly want people to understand there is another option.

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How is Event Espresso More than a WordPress Calendar?

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

Cellphone with calendar app

 

Wordpress Calendar

WordPress Calendar

If your organization has events, and your website is powered by WordPress, you’ve probably been looking for a WordPress calendar plugin to list your events. You need to make it easy for your customers to find your upcoming events, and that’s what a WordPress calendar does. The Event Espresso WordPress calendar plugin includes month, week, and day views and you can customize the WordPress calendar to fit your site’s style by editing the CSS style sheet. You can display events that span several days, recurring events, and you can color code your category of events so a customer can easily read your calendar and know which events they are most interested.

The power of a WordPress calendar really kicks in when customers can also buy a ticket for your upcoming events – that’s where Event Espresso comes in handy. With Event Espresso, you can list all your events on your WordPress calendar and facilitate your customers to register for your events, right from your WordPress website.  Collect and store the information of your registrants, collect payments, send confirmation emails, and even create spill-over events if your one event gets full. You can create seating limits, custom registration pages to ask the questions you need and so much more.

When you are looking for a WordPress calendar, we hope that you’ll recognize that your calendar can be more than a calendar page of events. Your WordPress Calendar, when integrated with Event Espresso, can facilitate your event registration (let people buy tickets to your events), and you can be more profitable.

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Why is Event Espresso Great for Non-Profit Organizations?

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

Organize Events and Volunteers with Event Espresso

Organize Events and Volunteers with Event Espresso

You’ll notice that not-for-profit organizations often have a following of people who are interested in their cause and who are eager to be involved, but what you will also notice is that those organizations do very little with that small army of volunteers. If you’ve ever participated in the same community service project or an event for a non-profit organization more than once, you’ll  see a lot of new faces that weren’t at the first event you attended. It is becoming increasingly important for non-profit organizations to be active in their mission and communities to keep their membership/advocates active and to continue to recruit other volunteers/advocates. Non-profit success is becoming more instantaneous and driven by how much help they can get from their participants. Event Espresso helps non-profits, or any organization for that matter, organize these people who care about their cause and want to get involved. We do have a list of a few of the non-profit organizations who are using Event Espresso and you can see how it has helped them organize their events, manage their volunteers, and collect revenue to support their mission and operations.

But you don’t have to just organize people into a formal event. To augment your formal events and keep your volunteers involved, you can also use Event Espresso to organize people into group and assignments. Here is an example of how Event Espresso can go beyond managing your formal events to managing your non-profit volunteer’s efforts.

Example scenario:

Let’s imagine we have a not-for-profit organization with the mission to improve the literacy rate among children in foster care.

We plan to achieve this mission by accomplishing three main objectives: 1) increasing the access to books for children in foster care, 2) increasing the frequency and length that foster parents read to/with their foster children, 3) recruiting an advocate in each public school facility that will champion this effort in their school and in their area.

  • To increase the access that foster children have to books, we’ve decided to do a community book drive to collect books for the school and local libraries. With this activity you will need people to volunteer to spread the word either by going door-to-door or by taking fliers into the community, blogging about the book drive, and even get people to collect the books and deliver them to the library. You can use Event Espresso by creating events for each of these activities and asking people to sign up for them. You can set limits on the events/assignments to make sure that everyone is assigned to where you need them and that your efforts aren’t overlapped. You’ll also have people organized into groups that you can send subsequent communication.
  • To increase the frequency/length that foster parents and children read together we are planning a read-in, where parents and children will go to the local library to 1) obtain library cards, 2) check out three books, and 3) read at least one book together while at the library. The read-in will also include a reading competition that people can register for on your website, with recognition for the highest achievers. With people pre-registering for the read-in, Event Espresso can help you gauge the volume of participation even before the read-in event, market to those who sign up and remind them to work toward their goals, and even evaluate how much of an impact you might have in the community with this event.
  • To recruit an advocate in each public school we are going to speak with the attendees to our read-in event and try to recruit participants. With the easy sign-up form or even manual registration features of Event Espresso, each of your advocates at the library can register on your site for another event and thereby organize people into another group. You can then communicate directly with this group and create future events/assignments for them to commit to do.

This is just a simple example of all the great ways you can use Event Espresso to manage your events on WordPress. Non-profit organizations can use Event Espresso to bring in revenue from their golf tournaments, service projects, etc. but they can use it to organize their volunteers and staff. Create an event/assignment that people can sign up for and let this great software do the heavy work of managing your volunteer efforts.

Are these ideas new to you, or have you started to harness the complete power of Event Espresso? What novel ways have you found to use Event Espresso? I hope I’ve inspired you.

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In addition to supporting their mission Event Espresso also offers a discount to non-profit organizations. If you are a non-profit organization and would like to use Event Espresso to manage your events, please complete the Non-profit  Discount form. If you’re a non-profit organization and you’re already using Event Espresso, we’d love to hear what it has done for you. If you don’t have a website or if it’s not built on WordPress (a content management system), let us know and we can help you understand the process to having an inexpensive website with these capabilities.

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Posted in Event Planning | 6 Comments »

How to Put Your Events on Autopilot

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

hand pointing or pressing

Modern technology can make a plane takeoff, fly and even land all by itself, but yet some event managers and web masters are manually managing their events! In the early 1900’s, inventors and engineers figured out the autopilot system. Now, in the early 2000’s, the inventors and engineers of Event Espresso have designed a system to make events open and close registration all by itself – setting them to autopilot.

The new Recurring Events Manager add-on for Event Espresso and WordPress gives webmasters, authors, publishers and event managers the freedom to schedule their events on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly schedule and to step away from the wheel. With Event Espresso, all you have to do is add the event details once, and then schedule the event to happen again when you’d like it to. The events will automatically show up on your site when registration opens and registration will close automatically when you’ve scheduled it to close.

In a future release of this incredible add-on, you’ll be able to create a custom recurring schedule that is not based on a predictable schedule. Instead you could create an event to happen at on a Tuesday, then a Wednesday, then a Sunday or one week later or 3 days later or 38 days later, etc. and the system will take care of the rest. Bring your event technology into the 21st century with the Event Espresso Recurring Events Manager Add-on for WordPress.

There is no reason you should spend so much time managing your events. If you spend more than one hour even worrying about opening and closing the registration for your events, then you’re wasting your time and money. The cost of this add-on is an investment to make you more productive by saving you time and money. Saving you time and earning you more money, that’s the power of Event Espresso and the new Recurring Events Manager plugin for WordPress.

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What are the Top Event Registration Strategies?

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

The last five years of event management has brought about a lot of interesting discussions. One of the most frequent and heated topics has always been about how much information do you give potential customers and how many steps do they need to complete in order to finish the event registration process? My argument has always been that it will depend on the type of website you have and the potential customers you are marketing to. There are two polar schools of thought that are analogous to the experience of going to a golf course verses going to an amusement park.

Focused Registration – Like Going to a Golf Course

Focused Registration

The golf course customer, or golfer, has specific intentions for coming to the golf course. The golfer can look through products at the pro shop and make a purchase, work on his swing mechanics by hitting a bucket of balls, do some putting on the practice green or play a round of golf. As a customer, the golfer is always catered to and the sales pitches are never unrelated. The pro shop is helpful and directive, but never pushy. In general, the golf course tries to establish a relationship that will be lucrative over a lifetime.The putting greens are available to anyone who comes to the course, even if you’re not a paying customer. You can even hire a caddy to give you personalized attention throughout your round of golf to watch your swing and suggest strategies for playing the course.

Managing your events and registration process similar to a golf course is done by making it as simple and specific as possible. The event description should be rather simplistic and easy to understand but offer enough information for your customers to understand the event and become comfortable with registering. The event process should be as few steps as possible and as few pages as possible. This does not mean that you have to avoid any up-selling , after all don’t they offer a cart with your round of golf? The important thing is to consider who your potential customers are and what will serve them best. What kind of event registration process will meet their expectations and what will keep them coming back? If you have customers that are busy, but are familiar with your website and products, and that will pay extra for convenience, then make the event registration process really easy. Don’t be afraid to give them one up-selling opportunity but the option must be really easily understood and easily accepted or rejected so they can make a quick decision and move on.

Add-On Registration – Like Going to an Amusement Park

Add-On Registration

Add-On Registration

Think back to the last time you went to an amusement park, did you have a specific plan for the entire day or did you more or less wander throughout the park? You probably planned what time of day you wanted to go on the rides that get you wet and the ones you wanted to go on with and without kids, etc. You were probably drawn in by a barker to toss a few baseballs or shoot a few targets to win someone special a giant teddy bear. You may have even gotten lost in the amusement park and had to ask for directions to get out! After you pushed your fun equilibrium to the limit and emptied your wallet, you swear you’ll never go back.

This is a perfect example of an add-on registration strategy that presents multiple add-on opportunities to potential customers, encouraging them to increase the final transaction amount. This strategy works best for browsing customers who are aware of  your products and services but are compelled to purchase because of a promotional opportunity. If you’ve ever searched for a job on one of the major job websites then you know what I mean. Just about every other step is an offer for an online class or degree. This approach can be very damaging to a relationship and can even discourage purchases (immediate and future), but the interaction value may be maximized.

Register It

Depending on how your website is designed, who your customers are and their intentions (focused or browsers) you should consider the event registration process you are taking them through in order to join your events. Make the registration process as easy as possible if you want to build a relationship with your customers. If you’re never going to interact with your customers again then an add-on event registration process may be the best strategy.

Smell the Aroma – (a.k.a, how Event Espresso can help with both strategies)

You can get the most out of your event registration process with Event Espresso (WordPress events plugin). The focused event registration strategy is accomplished by keeping your event titles simple, your event descriptions short, the information required to register is kept to a minimum, and the event plugin can even be configured to complete the registration process before receiving payment which affords you the opportunity to give the potential customer individual attention to finish the registration process if they happen to abandon it.

If you want to pursue an add-on strategy then give the potential customer as many registration options as you can imagine. Add information to products and other events in the description area of these events and include that same information in the confirmation emails. Eventually, Event Espresso will include a shopping cart option that will allow you to add related items to your events to try and up-sell the customer.

Which event registration strategy do you use or have you ever really thought about it? Tell me why you think your strategy does or doesn’t work.

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