Event App for Workshops: What You Need and What You Can Skip

You are running a workshop for thirty people, and you have been told you need an event app.

Your job is smaller than that sounds. People have to sign up. They have to know what happens and when. You have to know who turned up. Afterwards, you have to be able to reach them.

That is four jobs: registration, an agenda, check-in and follow-up. An event app for workshops only has to do those four well. Everything else you will be sold is for a different kind of event.

What you need

Registration

Thirty places, and you want to know who has one.

Set the ticket type once: a name, a price or “free”, and the number of places. When the places are gone, the sales stop. You do not have to count.

People register on a public event page and the ticket arrives by email. If the workshop is paid, a payment is part of that same step. If it is free, there is nothing to set up for payments at all.

Set the places to the number your room really holds, not the number you hope for.

An agenda

A workshop agenda is short, and it changes. The exercise runs long. The break moves. The guest slot swaps with the one after lunch.

So the useful thing is one agenda, in one place, that you can change in a sentence. Sessions with a title, a start and an end time. A facilitator or guest attached where there is one. A session you have pencilled in but not confirmed stays hidden until you publish it.

Attendees open the agenda in their browser, from the link in their ticket email. They see the version you last changed, because there is no second copy to forget.

Check-in

For thirty people, check-in is not a queue problem. It is a “did Sam come?” problem.

Each ticket has a short check-in code in the ticket email. At the door, you take the code and mark the person present from your phone. If the same code comes up twice, you are told it was already used and when. A refunded ticket is refused.

You do not need scanner hardware. You need a phone, and a few minutes before people arrive to try one check-in from the phone you will actually use.

Follow-up

This is the job people leave until Monday and then do badly.

The attendee list shows who holds a ticket and whether they checked in. You can ask for it as a spreadsheet file for the event. That gives you the people to thank, the people who registered and did not come, and the list your own email tool needs.

Presso Events gives you the list. What you write to them, and from which tool, is yours.

What you can skip

Most of the feature lists you will see were written for conferences. For a room of thirty, these are weight you carry for nothing.

• A native app download. Nobody should have to find an app store before a three-hour workshop. A link in the ticket email that opens in the browser is enough. An app that half the room has not installed on the morning is worse than no app.
• Networking matchmaking. Thirty people can look at one another. Put name badges on the table and give them an exercise in pairs. A matching algorithm solves a problem you do not have.
• Sponsor tooling. Lead retrieval, sponsor profiles and booth analytics are for events with sponsors. If you have one logo on a slide, you do not need a module.
• Live polling platforms. A show of hands, a sticky note or a question out loud does the job in a room this size. A separate platform means a second link, a second login and a second thing to go wrong while you are facilitating.

None of this is a criticism of those features. They earn their place at a two-day conference. A workshop is a different job, and the best tool is the one you stop thinking about.

Set it up by asking

You do not need to learn a dashboard for this.

Presso Events works through Claude. You add the Presso Events connector once, sign in, and describe the workshop in plain words:

Create a workshop called Pricing for Freelancers. It’s on 12 November at 10am, finishing at 1pm, at the Studio in Bristol. One ticket type, 30 places, free.

Claude asks what is missing, one question at a time. It will not make up a price, a capacity or a venue. If you have not said it, it asks.

Then the agenda:

Add three sessions. 10:00 Welcome and ground rules. 10:15 Pricing exercise. 11:45 Break.

Before you publish, Claude reads everything back to you: the ticket types, the places, the venue. You say yes, and you get the public link to share. Publishing is the one step that cannot happen by accident, because it is the moment a stranger can register.

On the day, you check people in the same way, from your phone. Afterwards, you ask for the attendee list.

It is one conversation for each job, in a tool you already use.

What it costs

Presso Events is a flat 1%, all included.

A short checklist for your workshop

• Set the places to what the room holds.
• Put the venue and the start time in your own words and check the read-back.
• Add your sessions, and keep any you are unsure of unpublished.
• Try one check-in from your own phone before the day.
• Ask for the attendee list when it is over, while the workshop is fresh.

That covers a thirty-person workshop. If you find you need more next year, the bigger features will still be there.

Your first workshop

You do not need an app to run a good workshop. You need people signed up, a plan they can see, a way to know who is in the room and a way to follow up.

If you have a workshop coming up, sign up at presso.events and publish your first event.