Today I am going to be talking about technology because I really love technology, and we're going to talk about online event registration solutions from simple to robust. This is one of many nonprofit focused podcasts, but it can apply to anyone who's running an online event. So business listeners, don't abandon me yet because I will definitely be giving you some nuggets of goodness for your online event signups today. The examples I use, however, will be for my nonprofit friends, who are trying to pull everything together and switch all of their fundraising events online during this current season of social distancing.

 

Depending upon what kind of event you're planning on running for your organization, you're going to have to tackle a tech challenge, which is allowing people to sign up for your event online. We're going to talk about the functionality that allows people to go online, type in their information, and register for your event. Now, there are lots of different ways you can do this. I'm going to go over five different ways you can do this today. I'll tell you when you should use each one and how they work.

 

Form on your website - Formidable Pro, Gravity Forms

Event plugin - Paid and Free

Free third party solutions - Survey Monkey 

Paid third party solutions -  SignMeUp, Signup Genius

Paid third party solutions with marketing - Eventsmart, Eventbrite, Facebook 

 

What’s the difference between first party solutions and third party solutions? 

I consider third party solutions things that are not on your website. They might integrate with your website, but they are not physically housed on the server that houses your website. That's why it’s called third party solutions. The other options are physically on your website. So you have a little bit more control over those and the interface of them. So those are your first-party solutions.

 

Form on Your Website - Formidable Pro, Gravity Forms

Let's start with our first-party solutions. The first one is you can put a form on your website. You can build your form however you want to build your form. There are tons of different form builders out there. We build all of our websites in WordPress, so the examples I'll give you today are for WordPress websites. 

 

Formidable Pro 

Our favorite one is Formidable Pro, we love it. It integrates with multiple different types of payment gateways and it allows a lot of flexibility for the events sign up. It has things like conditional fields, so if you said you wanted a T-shirt, it would ask you how big you want it to be. It all depends on how you set up the form. So that form can be as lengthy and intense as you want it to be. 

 

I could go on and on about the power of these types of form building plugins because we have made them do so many different things in our years of building websites. The very first