Chapter 10. Managing Events

For many organizations, events provide one of the best opportunities to interact face to face with their members, supporters, and other constituents. Constituents get more exposure to your organization and develop deeper ties with it and the other attendees when they attend your events. Whether you host large conferences and expos, training workshops, webinars, political rallies, user group meet-ups, support round tables, professional accreditation programs, or any other kind of event, their role in your overall CRM strategy is significant.

Registrant processing and event promotion are often the most challenging, time-consuming, and important pieces of the management process. CiviCRM provides flexible event management tools to define the nature of the event, determine the data and fees that must be collected, track participants as they register online or are entered by staff through the administrative tools, and develop the lists, name tags, and other resources...

First things – why events?

Before digging into things, it's worth taking a minute to ask the questions: why would you host events, and what exactly is an event as it relates to CiviCRM?

Many not-for-profits exist as organizations that people donate to, become members of, or support in other ways. The purpose and services many organizations provide are not oriented around walk-in support or other face-to-face interactions with constituents, apart from events.

All in all, events provide an important person-to-person interaction with your supporters, volunteers, members, donors, and other contacts interested in or related to your organization.

So what exactly is an event? In CiviCRM, event management tools allow you to do the following tasks:

• Publishing and advertising an event description, including date, time, and location

• Registering participants

• Calculating and collecting fees

• Collecting data about participants

• Tracking registrants' status

• Using more advanced elements, such as self-registration...

Building and promoting your event

The first step in event management is to configure your event in the system. Once configured, you can begin collecting registrations and tracking participants. The event tools all reside under the navigation bar's Events menu. As with the other areas of CiviCRM, the event administration tools are not always provided in a simple, task-oriented workflow. You are likely to find that the creation, configuration, registration, tracking, reporting, and managing happen in a more iterative pattern, rather than a linear one. We will begin by walking through the event creation process, touching on the various options available, and may circle back later to delve deeper into specific areas.

Use the New Event option to begin the process of setting up an event. This opens up an initial information and basic settings form. After saving it, you will be directed to a tabbed interface, where you optionally configure other settings areas (or return to adjust this first form...

Processing and managing participants

You've configured your event, tested it, and publicly promoted the online information page and registration form. Before you know it, event registrations start rolling in. Now what?

As with so many other areas of CiviCRM, these records may be viewed collectively through search tools or on an individual-contact basis. In this section, we'll walk through the event registration as it is viewed through the contact's record and then briefly review importing participant records.

Working with event registrations

A contact's history of event attendance will appear in their Events tab. From this tab, you can view, edit, or delete an existing registration, or create a new registration for the contact:

If you have configured an integrated payment processor in your system, there will be two buttons above the event history listing: Add Event Registration and Submit Credit Card Event Registration. The first listing is used for registrations that do not involve real-time...

Tracking, searching, and reporting

In the previous section, we worked with an individual contact record to see how the registration is created with an associated contribution record. In this section, we will begin working with multiple participant records.

Tracking registrations using the dashboard

One of the most important things for you as an event manager is the ability to quickly see how many people have registered for a given event. CiviCRM provides you with a snapshot to these details on Events | Dashboard.

Similar to other areas of CiviCRM, this Dashboard page provides a snapshot into key data in a summarized fashion. For events, this consists of a listing of upcoming events with registrant counts broken down into various categories, and a list of recent registrations received.

The registrant counts are very useful and bear some explanation. Review the following screenshot:

CiviCRM helps you understand your participant records by breaking them down into categories. We begin with the number...

Additional tools and options

There are a few remaining event-related options and extensions we want to point out before closing out this chapter with a discussion of events as it relates to your overall CRM strategy. The event component has a few settings that you should review and consider. These are available by visiting Administer | CiviEvent | CiviEvent Component Settings.

The Use Shopping Cart Style Event Registration option will significantly alter how CiviCRM handles event registration signups by allowing people to register for more than one event at a time. This feature will affect the online registration options for all existing online events, and so should be used cautiously. Further, it is still considered in alpha state, meaning that it is not fully refined and may have some outstanding issues and bugs. For this reason, we want to make you aware of the capability, but do not consider it a key feature in the system. If you are interested in using this functionality, we recommend...

Integrating events into your CRM strategy

One of the challenges of writing a book about software like CiviCRM is that it's really easy to remain modularized, and consequently, it would be easy for you to approach the software in a purely modularized way. That's fine to a large extent; you will naturally think and be structured around these blocks of functionality such as events, members, donations, case management, and so on. However, every so often, it's good to think outside of those modularized boxes and push beyond to realize the full potential of the software.

You've created an event, published the registration form, collected registrations, pulled your attendance list, printed name badges, and presented a report to your Board of Directors. In short, you've experienced a successful event management process.

However, what have you done to invite attendees to take further action? Perhaps become involved in a committee, sign up for an e-newsletter, or join the organization as a member?

As...

Summary

For many organizations, events are the only opportunity that constituents have to see the face of your organization. How you manage your event and what tools you have to effectively track and report on the success of the event will ultimately impact your bottom line. CiviCRM provides tremendous tools for generating both simple and complex structures and managing registrants through every phase of the project.

In this chapter, we walked through the configuration of events and discussed in detail the many options available and reviewed how an event registration impacts the contact record. We even registered a contact administratively and understood best practices when working within the backend environment. We discovered how CiviCRM calculates participant counts and how these can be effectively used to track the registration progress. We ran searches for participants and took bulk action on the resulting records, and generated reports to summarize event income details and produce attendee...