CIVICRM - 2
Managing Participants
Once you've created your event and provided the registration form to website visitors, you will need to begin managing your participants through the CiviEvent administrative tools. CiviEvent provides the ability to register participants administratively, search through participants based on a variety of criteria, export participant lists, and perform a number of other functions on your event records. CiviEvent not only gives participants a smooth journey from registration to payment to attendance at the event, but also lightens the burden of administrative duties on your organisation's staff.
An events' administrator at your organization can view an intuitive events dashboard that brings together all your events and participant information in one place. In this section we will discuss how these administrative tools are used.
Registering a Participant
While CiviCRM helps alleviate data entry for event registration by allowing your constituents to register directly through your website, it is likely that you will continue to have a segment of your contacts that continue to register by mail, phone, or in person on-site.
As with other functions in CiviCRM, you register a contact for an event by first locating their contact record, and then selecting the Events tab. This tab displays a summary list of past event attendance and provides a link for registering the contact for a new event.
You'll notice that there are two options available for registering the contact: "new event registration" and "submit credit card event registration." The latter will only be available if you've configured a payment processor that allows direct payments through your website. The first option is used for offline registrations—those that do not require actually processing a credit card. The interface for both options is very similar, with the exception of those fields that impact the payment recording details.
After choosing to create a new registration for this contact, you are taken to a form where you complete details regarding the record.
As you work through this form, you'll notice certain sections of the page may change to reflect selections you have made. For example, when you choose the event you want to register the contact for and select their participant role, the form will automatically load predefined custom data fields that pertain to those selections.
If the event selected is a paid event, you will see an event fees section which has been defined in the event configuration details, and an option to record the financial transaction details will be visible (Record Payment).
This introduces an important concept central to CiviCRM's event function (as well as other areas). Event registration records in CiviCRM are independent of, but can be related to, a financial transaction. While this may seem confusing to organizations accustomed to viewing event registrations as essentially a financial transaction, it offers an important and valuable distinction.
An event registration communicates the contact's participation in the organization's event. A corresponding financial transaction indicates the monetary value associated with that participation. While related, the two are distinct.
The distinction is best understood by considering the all too common scenario of an organization waiving fees for certain attendees. This may be done because the individual is a V.I.P., a speaker, or is participating in the event in a limited way. Regardless, the organization will want to record the individuals involvement in the event by registering them, but may not want to create an associated financial transaction.
CiviCRM respects this distinction by recording the event registration record under the Events tab, and the Financial record under the Contributions tab, and then creating a link between the two records.
Bulk Registration Action
A great time saving feature that CiviCRM offers is bulk registration for an event. Using this feature you can register a group of contacts simultaneously.
- Search for the contacts you want to register for a particular event
- On the search result page, click "select all" or use the checkboxes to select only those records you wish to register.
- From the actions dropdown box, select "Add Contacts to Event" and click Go.
- Complete the participant registration form.
Note that when registering multiple participants for an event using this tool there are two limitations:
- You are not able to define different registrant settings for each individual, as they are all recorded based on the same form fields. However, after recording the registrations, you can go into each record and modify the registration as needed.
- You are not able to record payments with the registration. Since each individuals payment for an event will likely be distinct from the other registrants, CiviCRM does not provide the option of recording payment details. For this reason, the bulk registration tool may be best suited for free events or registrants who are not required to pay fees.
Bulk Import Registrations
Another way to register a large number of individuals quickly is to import registrants from another application using a "comma-separated-values" format file (CSV).
This can be very convenient in a number of situations. Your organization may be collaborating with another organization for a specific event where the other organization has a preferred events registration system other than CiviCRM. Or perhaps a volunteer in charge of the event with no experience using CiviCRM recorded registrations with MS Excel. In these cases it is still important to capture inside CiviCRM those individuals who have registered through these alternative methods. Importing the records into CiviCRM will help consolidate your information and allow better interactions with your contacts in the future.
Importing records involves preparing your data, and then walking through the Import Participants wizard.
It is ideal if the records to be imported contain data that can uniquely match to an existing contact in your CiviCRM database. In general, the first name, last name and email are used for this purpose. Be aware that even slight variations in these values can inadvertently create duplicate contact records. you may want to run deduplication rules after the import in order to identify and merge duplicate records.
In some cases where there are only a few registrants to be imported and they already exist in CiviCRM, it may make sense to use the bulk registration action above. But usually when there is a significant number of registrations, including registrants who are not currently in your database, it will be faster and lead to less errors if you process a bulk import and deal with deduping efforts after the import.
Find Participants
Up until this point we have focused on how to register contacts for events and review past event participation for each individual through the contact's Events tab. But one of the most important functions of any event management tool is the ability to search for participants and quickly pull up attendance lists for an event.
Returning to the main event dashboard page (by clicking the CiviEvent menu item), you notice that the list of upcoming events includes several hyperlinked options in the attendee summary column.
The hyperlinked options available will depend on your registrants to date. For example, if you have no Registered/Attended status records, the text would not be hyperlinked. Selecting one of the options quickly displays a list of the registrants meeting that criteria for the event.
CiviCRM also provides event participant search tools, accessible by clicking Find Participants in the CiviEvent submenu. The resulting search form provides the ability to search by participant name, event name, event type, event dates, participant status, participant role, fees, pay later registrants, and any combination of the above.
After conducting a search you have the opportunity to select all of the resulting records or a subset, and to perform an action on the records. The actions available include:
- Batch update participants via profile: This feature is useful if you wish to edit multiple fields for multiple participants in a table grid layout. Note that you must create the profile set you wish to use before implementing this action. If you are not familiar with how profiles work, please investigate that before using this feature.
- Cancel event registrations for the selected participants.
- Delete participants: Deleting participants does not delete the contact record but will delete all transactions and activities associated with the participant. Note that this action cannot be undone.
- Export participants: The export function is one of the most useful tools available to event managers, allowing you to export a predefined set of fields or create your own custom set of fields (which can be saved for reuse). The software exports to CSV format which can be easily opened in standard spreadsheet software or directly used for mail merges.
- Create a new smart group: Smart groups are saved search results based on defined criteria, similar to a query. The advantage of a smart group is that the system will rerun the query using the criteria you have defined each time you open it. This is particularly helpful for more complex search criteria that you need to view on a regular basis.
- Send an email to selected participants: CiviCRM also lets you generate an email on the fly to your search result list. For example, you may want to let recipients know details about the event in advance, such as parking options or local area restaurants for those arriving early.
Additional Search Tools
CiviCRM has several pre-built custom search pages available through Find Contacts » Custom Searches that provide advanced tools for event management.
- Event Aggregate: This report generates the total amount of fees collected for events based on the criteria provided in the search form. In essence, this provides a way to "connect" your event registrations with their corresponding contribution records and generate a total.
- Price Set Details for Event Participants: Because of the potential complexity of price sets it can be difficult to easily generate totals for each price field using the standard event search interface. This custom search displays price set details for a specific event as a table, which can be easily exported and used for developing reports.