How to Choose the Perfect Church Event Planning Solution

You’ve worked long and hard to prepare for your church’s upcoming children’s ministry conference. If all goes well, this will be the first of many such gatherings. But you know that if you’re not able to manage the promotion and registration for the event, it doesn’t matter how well-organized the conference is. You need a solution that will make the reservation and money-handling process as simple and intuitive as possible.

To make it work, this event solution has to fire on multiple cylinders. You need to be able to:

• Register attendees
• Take money up front
• Receive all the appropriate information, i.e., what size t-shirts to order
• Easily monitor progress with a glance

Let’s take a look at some of your options.

1. Do it offline

I can’t imagine any scenario where someone would think this was a tenable choice. But you could put a sign-up sheet in your lobby, and have people email, phone, or text you to RSVP or register.

Obviously, choosing to handle an event in this fashion is going to reflect poorly on your conference before it even begins. You’re going to need to come up with a much better event planning solution than this.

2. Use a premium tool

Using a service like Eventbrite or Brown Paper Tickets might seem like a good idea but there are some serious drawbacks:

• Unless your event is free, it’s a more expensive option that will cut into the profitability of your event. This usually includes a set dollar amount per ticket and a percentage of the ticket’s value.
• Their market for promoting events isn’t always church-friendly. Someone can log in to look for your conference under local events and be met with a myriad of questionable options.
• With some of these enterprise-level services, you do not receive the money raised from the event until the event is over.

3. Use an economy tool

Another option is to use a generic form tool like Google Doc or Wufoo, paired with a payment provider like Paypal, Stripe or Google Checkout. The biggest advantage is that it’s a cost-efficient solution, but that also contributes to its deficiencies:

• It’s not going to mesh with your church database, so you’re going to have to do more work to juggle various elements together.
• It’s not an elegant solution. It will look like exactly what it is: Some complementary tools hacked together to do the job. Forget about a consistent branding experience!

4. Use Pushpay Events

Powerful and elegant, the new Pushpay Events tool is a perfect middle ground between the premium event platforms and more cost-conscious alternatives. Unlike the high-priced choices, it’s created with the church in mind, and it is more productive and powerful than the bottom-tier choices.

Consider these features:

• Easily create an attractive and branded website where people can register for your event.
• Accept credit cards online with your Pushpay merchant account.
• Track cash and check payments offline.
• Quickly see important stats (number of attendees, dollar amount transferred, t-shirt sizes, etc.).
• Get the information you need by creating custom questions for the registration process.
• Receive funds immediately instead of waiting until the end of the event.
• Effortlessly integrate payments with the most popular database systems.

Event registration has been the most requested tool for churches using Pushpay, and we’re excited to roll out this robust tool. Since the key to cost efficiency lies in using the same tool to accomplish many important tasks, this is a perfect time for churches to start using Pushpay for as their mobile giving solution while enjoying the benefit of the Pushpay event planning tool.

Talk to a Pushpay expert to learn how you can combine multiple key church technologies in one, simple platform and save your church money (and save your admins hours of wasted time on redundant tasks). Over 7,000 ministries already use Pushpay to help manage events, registration, and even event fundraising within the platform. Click here to learn more about this powerful tool that can help your church level up its events.