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Events

Aim

Understand CiviEvent and be comfortable managing events and participants

Objectives

Specific objectives:

  • Understand how to configure CiviEvent
  • Understand the basic records involved with events (events, participants, contacts)
  • Understand how to create and manage events and participants
  • Understand the end user event registration process

Learning points

You should aim to cover the following points in this session

  • Event building blocks

    • Events, participants, contacts
    • Participant types
    • Participant statuses
    • Price sets
    • Custom data

    • Event management tools

    • Event dashboard

    • Event templates
    • Scheduled reminders
    • Early bird pricing

    • Online registration

    • Pre-populating information

Extra points that it would be good to go into, if there is time include:

  • Website integration (e.g. with views)
  • The CiviDiscount extension

Session Plan

This session should last 60 minutes. Without the exercises, you should be able to complete it in 30 minutes.

Outline the main things that you can do with CiviEvent

  • Manage events
  • Allow users to register themselves online.

Basic concepts (15 minutes)

Introduce the idea of events and participants, and how participants link contacts to events. Might be helpful to draw a diagram illustrating how these are connected. Highlight the difference between event particpants and people added to CiviCRM activities.

Ask people to outline the main characteristics of an event and write these down on the board as they come out. Make sure the final list contains

  • Title
  • Description
  • Date and time
  • Location
  • Type (conference, training, etc.)
  • Cost

If they have listed things that aren't core CivICRM objects, it might be worth while noting that you could add these with custom data.

Similar to the above, ask people to outline the main characteristics of a participant and write these on the board as they come out. Make sure the final list contains:

  • Type (attendee, speaker, etc.)
  • Status

Again, if they have listed things that aren't in CivICRM, explain that these can be added with custom data. It is likely that they will mention characteristics that relate to a contact as well as participants, e.g. their food preferences. This might be a good opportunity to explain the difference between contacts and participant records.

What CiviEvent looks like (5 minutes)

Show people a live event dashboard. From there you can go to a list of participants, and from there you can go to contacts.

Show people some front event CiviEvent registration pages.

More useful tools for events (10 minutes)

Explain the following tools that can also be used for managing events

  • Event templates
  • Price sets
  • Scheduled reminders
  • Waiting lists
  • Early bird pricing
  • Discounts
  • Explain that if you are logged in and you use the public form you will add yourself to the event/change your own contacts details

Part 2 and 3 of the exercises cover these areas. If time permits, learners can choose to carry on with these exercises.

Creating and managing events (25 minutes)

Learners should now have a basic grasp of events and how they work. They can now complete part 1 of the exercises. If learners complete part 1, they can move to part 2 and 3.

Online registration (5 minutes)

Once most learners have completed part 1, we should do a test of someone's online registration at the front of the class (a learner can do this, or you can do it).