The Easiest Way to Add Events to your Church Site

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By adding your events directly to your church's WordPress site, your community can find exactly what they're looking for and you can be prepared for attendance.

Most churches have lots of events going on at any given time. The easiest way to add events to your church site is to use The Events Calendar on your WordPress site. You can even take it a step further by adding an RSVP to each of your events so that you can best plan for turnout.

Consider that in a given week a church may have events and programs for Children, Middle Schoolers, High Schoolers, College Students, Young Professionals, Men, Women, Small Groups, Outreach groups, Musicians, and Artists in addition to their regular weekend worship service(s). This is a lot to manage without a system in place, especially if clarity is something you enjoy.

Most churches don’t have a good solution to this problem.

Some churches rely on email lists to send out event reminders and announcements. But this isn’t sustainable over the long haul, especially if you have multiple email lists for different ministries. You have to constantly stay on top of the lists, ensuring they are up to date and accurate, which is not a great use of time.

Other churches rely on a Facebook page to communicate their calendar of events and programs. This may work for some people but believe it or not, there are people who are not on Facebook. Why require the people in your community to sign up for a social platform they don’t want? Why not provide a better solution to the problem of event communication? By using a central location, you can add events directly to your church site instead.

Still, other churches use expensive database systems to manage their communication needs. Most of these programs are powerful and handle events well. The catch is they also handle 100 other things: online giving, attendance, messaging, child check-in, etc. As someone who had to train an entire congregation on how to use one of these systems, let me tell you, it wasn’t fun…at all. Did I mention they are crazy expensive?

None of these solutions is a home run. They work for certain situations but they all have fatal flaws be it upkeep, access, or cost. We believe that the best way to communicate the upcoming events and programs at your church is Events Calendar Pro.

Events Calendar Pro For The Win!

What Events Calendar Pro offers is a simple yet powerful calendar that can house all of your church’s events in one easy-to-access place…your own WordPress site! There is also no need for your community to sign up to use Events Calendar Pro, it just sits on your website waiting to share information with them. And there are no outrageous fees with Events Calendar Pro either. It’s just $99 for a Personal license!

How Does It Work?

Events Calendar Pro is simple. Add your event information, add a featured image (if you want), publish and it’s added to the calendar. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Once the event has been added to the calendar, your community will be able to see it on the calendar, click on the event for details, and import it to their iCal or Google Calendar if they’d like to. With the built-in ability to view the calendar in multiple ways plus the ability to filter through event listings, Events Calendar Pro provides a simple yet powerful calendar for your community to enjoy.

Sell Tickets To Your Events

You can even add ticket sales to your WordPress site. We have RSVP and ticket add-ons that allow your community to purchase tickets to upcoming events right from your calendar. This adds great value because it removes third parties and needless navigation. Simply find the event you want and purchase a ticket right then and there.

This functionality can be incredibly useful for church plays, musicals, concerts, recitals, etc. Remove the ticket lines, the need to cash checks, and the possibility of misplacing cash, while at the same time providing accessibility and ease for your community. It really is a win-win scenario.

Making The Switch

There are a few things you’ll need to do in order to get Events Calendar Pro up and running on your website. But don’t worry, the folks who keep your website in shape will be able to handle this quite easily.

Get On WordPress

Your website has to be built on WordPress. If your church is not currently using WordPress for its site, now might be a great time to consider switching over. Seriously, WordPress is great. It provides incredible flexibility, ease of use, and power.

If you are not ready to make the switch just yet there still is a way you can use Events Calendar Pro for your church’s calendar: create a WordPress site specifically for the calendar and ticketing plugins and link to it from the church’s main site. We’ve done this with our demo site so you can see what this would look like. A stand-alone calendar site can easily be built in a few hours by your tech team.

While this method isn’t ideal, it certainly beats not using Events Calendar Pro at all. Obviously, the best setup would be to have your church’s entire site on WordPress.

Choose The Correct License

You will need to purchase a license for Events Calendar Pro. Most likely you’ll only need the Personal license, which costs just $99! That’s peanuts compared to those database management systems mentioned earlier.

Should you desire to sell tickets through your website you’ll also have to pick up a license for one of our many ticket add-ons. The Personal license for one of these add-ons is $99 as well.

Add Your Events To Your Church Site

Once you’ve purchased and installed the plugins, you’re ready to start adding events to the calendar! While data entry will be the most time-consuming portion of the setup, it is well worth it in the end. You’ll have a beautiful calendar, full of events from all the ministries in your church, in a centralized, easy-to-navigate calendar for your whole community. We call that winning!

Share The News!

Now that you’ve done the work to make your church calendar awesome, you’ll want everyone in your community to know, right? You’ll want to tell your community where they can find all the information on upcoming events. This can be as easy as “Hey everyone, we’ve got a brand new calendar on our website that we think you’re going to love. Be sure to check it out and while you’re at it get your tickets for the upcoming Easter play!”

Events Calendar Pro is so intuitive to use that you won’t have to post a tutorial video or a step-by-step guide. Just share the link to the calendar and your community will know exactly how to find the events they are looking for.

Make Events Easier For Your Church Community

If you want to simplify your church’s calendar and make it easier for the people in your community to find the information they need, add events directly to your church site with Events Calendar Pro. Head over to the Events Calendar Pro page for screenshots and more detailed information. Also, don’t forget to check out our live demo of Events Calendar Pro.