How to Handle Past Events on Your Nonprofit’s Website

Your major event is over. Congrats! You can finally exhale.

But wait. How should you update your nonprofit’s website now?

We get asked some version of this question all the time. Here’s a brief walkthrough of what we recommend.

We’re using our nonprofit website platform here, but the steps should still apply no matter what platform your org uses.

Hope this helps you get more mileage out of every event your nonprofit hosts (even after it’s over).

Video Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

How should you handle an event once it passes on your nonprofit’s website?

It’s a question we get asked all the time. I wanted to just put together a quick video to show how we recommend your organization approaches events once they pass on your site.

So first of all, this is the individual event page promoting our upcoming or our past gala, gala, however you say it.

Not here to choose sides there. 

So this has passed at this point. Don’t delete this page. Sometimes people delete this page. I understand why, but don’t do it.

If you have old links floating around in email or social media, or maybe it was indexed in search results and people click it, they’re going to end up on a page not found error, and that’s not what we want.

We still want to provide them with a great experience. And actually what we’re going to do is provide them a little bit of a recap of what happened with the event and tease some future events that are coming up. So pause on this page, we’re going to circle back to it.

First thing you want to do is comb the website and remove any references to the event as an upcoming event. Because if an event has passed, we don’t want it still showing up as an upcoming event.

That doesn’t look very good. It looks pretty sloppy and can erode trust in your organization and just how up to date the information on your website is.

So you’re going to want to remove it from places like an event feed, or a homepage. We’re featuring a call to action for it on our homepage. This is valuable real estate. We don’t want to promote past events here.

If you’re using our nonprofit website platform to power your website, this is all going to happen automatically. So once an event date passes, it’s removed from these feeds automatically.

If you’re not, then the way that you do this is going to vary depending on your tools.

But for our homepage here, I’m just going to scroll down and you’ll see the annual gala is the featured event here. I’m just going to remove this block.

If you’re using WordPress, chances are it would work similarly to this. And now when I preview this, you’ll see when I scroll down my homepage, that event is no longer featured. We go right from the video into the statistics that are showing up.

So you’re just going to want to go through your website. Check event feeds, homepages, check your sidebar. Maybe you have events showing up in the sidebar of your website, or calls to action around your website, maybe in the footer. Some sites have a footer event feed.

Wherever you’re showcasing upcoming events, just make sure that it’s clean.

Now, the next thing you’re going to want to do is, if you have a blog on your website, this is a great opportunity to leverage it.

So let’s jump into the blog and we’re going to publish a recap blog post.

Our annual gala is a huge success, right? We’re going to talk about a recap of the evening. Paint a picture of what happened. Great place to showcase videos or photos. If you had a video that you played at the event, you could even embed it directly within the page itself.

And then we’re going to actually tease next year’s gala. You can tease future events.

You could even put an email sign up right on this blog post and you could tag people as being interested in next year’s gala. And then when you start promoting it, you have a segmented email list that you’re ready to send very targeted emails to. Because they expressed interest explicitly in being notified about your future events.

You could even link to some recent blog posts or upcoming events. It’s a great place to promote some upcoming events that you have.

Then once you’ve published this post, we’re going to grab the URL up here. This is where we’re going to jump back into that individual event page.

So I’m going to go into the backend here. I’m going to be editing my event.

I’m going to remove all of the content on this page currently. And I am going to write a very brief note here that our gala’s in the books. It was a blast.

And then I’m actually going to put a call to action block right here. Again, this is going to vary a little bit depending on the tools that you’re using, but you get the gist of it here.

I’m going to say our gala was a smashing success. Write a very brief description here. Thanks to everyone who came out together, we raised awareness and funds for our community.

Make your text a little bit more specific. I’m just doing this for a made up event for a made up nonprofit.

A button here, check out the recap and then I’m going to paste in the URL for the blog post that we just published.

Oh, and the other thing I want to do, you’ll see our event has a form on it. Make sure that you remove the registration form.

So for us, if you’re using our tools, just come down here for form type. Change that to “No Form.” That I’ll actually remove the form from the page.

And then I want to put an image on the background of this CTA. Just to make it a little bit more compelling. I’m going to choose this one that matches what we were doing, the image that we used on the blog post itself.

And here you go. You’ll see we have our call to action, and then when someone lands on this page, they’ll see, “Oh, the gala passed. I’ll check out the recap.”

And when they click the call to action, it takes them to the recap blog post.

You’ve tied up everything with a neat bow, providing a great experience for visitors. Even if they’re clicking old links, we’re still providing them a really positive experience on our website and showcasing some of those future opportunities for them to also get involved.

So I hope that helps with just how you wrap up events on your organization’s website. If you have any questions, just feel free to drop ’em in the comments and we’ll get you answers.

Thanks friends!