For many organizations, events provide one of the best opportunities to interact directly or face-to-face with members, supporters, and other constituents. Constituents are exposed to your organization and develop deeper ties with it and other attendees when they attend your events. Whether you host large conferences and expos, training workshops, webinars, political rallies, user group meet-ups, support roundtables, 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, nametags, and other resources you need to present an outstanding professional event.
This chapter will focus on the primary tasks and responsibilities involved in event management, including:
- Configuring your event and understanding the options available
- Promoting the event through information, registration, and participant listing pages
- Processing registrants through the administrative interface
- Reviewing registration progress and tracking statuses
- Ensuring good bookkeeping practices for registrants
- Searching for participants and running reports
Before digging further 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.
Events provide an important (and often, the only) in-person interaction with your supporters, members, and others committed to the mission and vision of your organization. As such, the face and voice of the organization is most clearly seen and realized during events.
So what exactly is an "event"? In CiviCRM, event management tools allow you to do the following:
- Publish and advertise an event description including date, time, and location
- Register participants
- Calculate and collect fees
- Collect data about participants
- Track registrant's status
- Use more advanced elements, such as self-registration forms on your site with automated waiting lists
You are not likely to use the event tools for very small group meetings, such as a one-to-one meeting with a constituent, board meetings, committee meetings, and other such no-fee, basic events. For these events, it will be easier and simpler to use a CiviCRM activity, either with the pre-configured meeting activity type, or through your own custom activity types.