We’ve tested The Events Calendar, with simple Ticketing and RSVP and compared with our current offering it is a substantial improvement to the publishing toolkit. By updating the events management options available in the OurLocality toolset, we hope that more local groups will use their website to promote themselves and perhaps rely a little less on social media, which extracts money from the local economy and squirrels advertising profits away in far flung places.
For Eventbrite users we’ve also looked at the Eventbrite Feed. If you are happy to outsource event management functions to Eventbrite and your needs are basic (the feed looks like this), this plugin is quite simple to setup and deploy. Ping us an email to activate it for you – for you to test and play with.
Remember also to update your privacy policy, indeed you should do so every time you integrate a third party service (even embedding a youtube video is an integration) as cookies and tracking trails are the norm.
If you need to keep things entirely on your website or don’t want to integrate too many third part services, The Event Calendar is a satisfactory solution, provided you realise that many of the bells and whistles are premium services, though not necessary for a fully functional service.
If you are needing an all singing and dancing event management solution you are probably making some money from events. Naturally this comes at a cost – in terms of your time to set up the systems and managing each event and using either a third party service or a premium plugin. Remember too that linking with Paypal or Stripe involves processing fees and storing customer and transaction data.
We only recommend the paid tool for more advanced users. Also you should have a full blown email account set up on your domain and able to send via your “authorised” domain via a reputable mail provider (to avoid server mail ending up in spam).
If you want help to get set up, ping us a mail, but we can’t do this for nothing unless you qualify for our free support.