Looking to Transition — Will The Events Calendar meet my needs?

[Emily @ the Library]

I looked into The Events Calendar about a year ago. Our library is currently using EventKeeper, and it’s not mobile friendly at all (and also pretty ugly and clunky). I see an RSVP function has been added — woohoo!

I am wondering if the Events Calendar now meets our needs.
This is our wishlist:

1. Recurring events
2. RSVP for events (with name, phone, email)
3. Ability to RSVP multiple people at once (example: a parent bringing several children to an event could RSVP all of them at once and fill in their names, instead of having to reload the page and RSVP each child individually.)
4. Ability to RSVP on a mobile device
5. Editor functionality that does not require access to our entire WordPress site. We would like staff members to be able to add their own events, but not have the ability to go changing around our website! We do not need community-added events, only staff.
6. Ability to quickly email RSVP’d guests if an event is cancelled.

Our current calendar solution meets all of the above points except practical functionality on mobile devices. The lack of mobile support is a dealbreaking at this point, so we’re looking at other solutions. If you could meet the items on the above wishlist, you would seriously open up your customer base to the world of public libraries. There’s little currently out there that meets our needs!

-Emily

[Leah]

Hi Emily,

Thanks for your interest! I’d be happy to answer your questions.

1. Recurring events

Events Calendar PRO has excellent and very flexible recurring event functionality. If you want, you can read more about all the options in this support article.

2. RSVP for events (with name, phone, email)

The free RSVP functionality that comes with Event Tickets allows you to collect names and emails for attendees.  If you need to collect phone numbers with the RSVP, you might be able to do it with some custom development. You could also consider doing free tickets with Event Tickets Plus, which allows you to collect more information.

Please note that at this time, RSVPs and tickets do not work with recurring events. We are hoping to extend that functionality in the future. That said, you could potentially work around this by making free tickets with ticket names that clearly tell users which date(s) they are registering for. The tickets can have defined purchase periods (so could end once that instance of the event had passed). But all tickets will show on all events in the series.

3. Ability to RSVP multiple people at once (example: a parent bringing several children to an event could RSVP all of them at once and fill in their names, instead of having to reload the page and RSVP each child individually.)

When a user RSVPs or buys tickets, they can select a number (e.g. 3 people coming or 3 tickets). However, only the name and information for that user is collected. We are working to extend this so that information can be collected for each ticket individually, but currently it’s not built in.

4. Ability to RSVP on a mobile device

Yes! All of our plugins are mobile friendly.

5. Editor functionality that does not require access to our entire WordPress site. We would like staff members to be able to add their own events, but not have the ability to go changing around our website! We do not need community-added events, only staff.

There’s a couple options for this. One is our Community Events plugin. You can set it up so that only logged-in site users can submit events (thus restricting it to your staff). They can then submit events from the front end of the site, without having any admin powers. Meanwhile, admins can approve and edit the submitted events as needed.

You can also use a user role plugin to define what kinds of event-related permissions users have. This would take some custom setup from you, but you could potentially arrange things so that staff members could make events but not see settings or other backend pieces of your site. Read more.

6. Ability to quickly email RSVP’d guests if an event is cancelled.

Yep! When viewing a list of attendees with Event Tickets or Event Tickets Plus, you can click our handy Email button to get in touch with them.

Thanks again for your interest! Let us know if you have further questions.

Best,

Leah

[Support Droid]

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If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
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