The four phases of event management and how to choose your approach
Depending on your level of comfort with technology and your budget, there are low-tech and more advanced techniques to take you through the four phases of event management.
Phases of managing an event from your website
There are four different phases of managing an event:
Announcing
Registering
Collecting Payments
Communicating
Announcing
The first phase of managing your event is promoting it on your website. Whether it's online or in person, free or paid, people need to know about your event to attend! Use your website design skills to add a description, some images, buttons, or other links for the event.
Registering
If you need to know who plans to attend or you have a maximum capacity for your event, you'll need a mechanism for collecting names and email addresses.
Collecting Payments
For paid events, how attendees pay you depends on whether you can collect payments in person, by regular mail, or must receive payments online.
This phase of event management has the most options for setup and is influenced by which payment methods you have available to you and also which methods your attendees may prefer. Any online payment or payment by credit/debit card involves some interaction with a third-party payment processor and incurs fees for transactions.
Communicating
The final phase of event management is communicating with attendees after they register. You may be in touch with attendees for:
Reservation confirmation (required, include location and any preparation details)
Payment receipt (required, if not part of the confirmation)
Reminder of event (optional, to reduce no-shows, should also include a link if it’s an online event)
Followup after event (optional, as lead generator)
It all comes down to time, money, and technology
Each phase offers easy, intermediate, and advanced ways to accomplish what you want to do. There are a lot of choices and your decision depends how much free time you have, your comfort with technology, whether you’re willing to pay for and learn third-party products to automate some of the processes, and how many events and attendees you’ll have each year and the profits you expect to make. I recommend looking at the full set of tasks involved in running an event and weigh those against the time, money, and technology you want to invest for each type of task.
How much time do you have?
Easy methods for managing events save you time on setup, but generally require that you handle management tasks manually through email, documents, and spreadsheets. If you hold very small events a few times a year, you may be willing to accept the time it takes to do tasks manually.
Intermediate and advanced methods such as using Squarespace Scheduling or Commerce for paid events, or using third-party systems like Eventbrite, take more time to set up and learn. They also generally cost extra to employ because they offer automation to replace manual tasks. The automation saves you time because you’re not generating emails or saving records manually.
How much extra cost can you absorb?
Easy methods for managing events cost less, but don’t allow attendees to pay online. They must pay by cash or check.
Intermediate and advanced methods allow you to accept online payments through cards or apps. You’ll have to set up online payments through connections to payment processors. You will want to accept credit/debit cards for sure. You may also decide to accept PayPal payments or app payments, such as Apple Pay, Venmo, or Zelle. Those secure transactions cost money, usually fee-based per transaction, and the cost of transactions is also influenced by the type of Squarespace website plan you have.
How comfortable are you with technology?
Easy methods for event management involve only website updates, emails, and possibly spreadsheet or document recordkeeping.
Intermediate and advanced methods require you to set up payment processing and Squarespace website components. You’ll also need to monitor and manage automated systems for recordkeeping and communication. These methods also involve setting up external payment accounts.
Learn more in the next article
Understanding the phases of organizing and registering people for an event lays the groundwork for deciding how much technology to use to automate the process. The next article gives more details about technology available to you and the tradeoffs between time and money to employ them.
