Getting Started with Events

Understanding the Wild Apricot Events Module

With Wild Apricot's events module, you can set up one or several events - publish them online on your Wild Apricot website (or another website) and offer online self-service registration. Instead of registering manually (e.g., via email, fax, paper registrations) participants can register online - and can even pay online right away, e.g. with a credit card.

Wild Apricot also automates common administration tasks, such as:

• promoting events to your contacts with automatic event announcements
• sending scheduled event reminders to registered attendees
• automatically sending registration and payment receipts

With Wild Apricot you can also organize various types of events, for example:

• annual and regular conventions, conferences and seminars
• board meetings
• training sessions and webinar registration (e.g., does not include video steaming of webinar)
• small ad-hoc meetings and gatherings

Event registrations can be set up with:

• free or paid registration
• availability to public and/or members only
• an option to add guests
• additional add-on prices

You can customize an event registration form to collect specific information about registrants, meal choices and other preferences, breakout sessions and additional options.

Workflow overview

Events are managed from the Events tab. From which you'll see a complete list of all of your events.

Click on any event to view and edit it - or click on the ?Adding new events button to create a new one.

Once the event is set up and published for online registration, it will immediately show up on your Wild Apricot event calendar page - where your website visitors can preview the details and register for it.

A set of automated event announcement e-mails can be set up to promote your newly created event to people in your contact database.

When people receive the event announcement e-mail or just see the event on your website, they can open it to see more details - and proceed to register online.

You can offer registration 'tickets' with different pricing (AKA event registration types, see Event Registration Types). For example, you can have a ticket priced at $50 for general public and another priced at $40 for members only. Wild Apricot can automatically enforce ticket availability based on membership status in your Membership database (see Membership levels).

After selecting a ticket, registrants go through the event form and select additional event options, if any (for example, meal preference, event sessions).

Finally, unless this event is free, registrants go through the payment process.

In the meantime, in the system backend (aka administration interface), new registrants are automatically added to the attendees list, Wild Apricot can also automatically send event registration and payment receipts, as well as a notification to site administrators.

Wild Apricot can cap the maximum number of attendees, close registration on certain dates and save time and effort for you in many other ways.

As an administrator, you can always check the progress of your registration. From the event details you can always see how many people have purchased different tickets.

You can also run various reports that can help you with event organization - for example, a report that will allow you to see how many people have ordered fish and how many steak. In addition, you can also contact attendees by e-mail or export them into a spreadsheet file (for example, to create name tags).

Setting up a new event

To add an event, just click on the Adding new events button under the Events tab.

To setup an event, you need to configure the following information:

1. Basic information (aka Event details) - such as an event name, description, date and time
2. Registration form fields (if any)
3. Pricing and availability options (AKA Registration types) - E.g. one price for public and another for members; early bird pricing, etc.
4. E-mail templates and scheduling - for automatic registration confirmation e-mails, announcements and reminders

To save time you can create an event by copying any other existing event.

1. Adding basic information

Here you would provide basic event information such as event name, date and location. You can also use your artistic side (and our editor) to create a beautiful event Description that will be visible to your website visitors. You can add your posters, files for download and any additional information.

2. Customizing the registration form

In addition to the common fields (see: Customizing your contact database fields) that will be present on every form, you can also add as many custom (event-specific) fields as needed that will help you to collect additional registration details and event preferences.

With additional event registration fields you can collect event-specific information and even up-sell some extra options to your registrants. For example, you can add an event field that will offer a meal selection. Depending on the selection, an additional cost will be added at the checkout.

3. Adding tickets

• Pricing is set up through the registration types (see Event registration types). You need to set up at least one registration type (aka ticket) to enable online registration - or you can set up as many as desired.

For example, you can set up an event where you will offer:

1. free tickets to your premium members
2. $5 tickets to your regular members
3. $10 tickets to the general public

In addition you can also offer tickets only until or after a certain date.

Note, we do not process online payments ourselves. Instead you need to set up with one of the supported online payment processors, see Online Payments.

4. Automating event announcements, reminders and receipts

Each event can be set to include the following automatic e-mails:

• Announcements - use this e-mail to promote the event to your contacts
• Reminders - this one is used to send reminders to registered attendees
• Registration confirmations - can be sent to you (administrator) and attendee right after the registration

When on the event details page click on Emails link. To set them up or adjust, click on the Events database button.

Promoting event

There are a number of ways you can promote your Wild Apricot event:

• If you have an event calendar page (see Publishing your event calendar) on your website, it will appear there automatically. Similar to blog pages, each event calendar page has an RSS link that can be used by people to subscribe with an RSS reader.
• Set up automatic announcements to people in your Wild Apricot database (see Customizing event emails)
• Send automatic reminders to people who already registered
• Send out e-mail blasts with event information and a link to event details (see: Sending e-mail blasts)
• Promote your event in other ways (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and provide a link to your event details

Now people can view your event information - and proceed to registration right here.

Online registration process

Once you publish the event (by checking Enable registration checkbox on the event details) people can register for events online right on your website, from the event calendar page.

After selecting the event from the calendar page, registrant will select available ticket and fill-out the event registration form.

In addition to the calendar page you can also present your events through the gadgets that you can add to any pages of your website. For example, you can add an event gadget to your home page and it will automatically show the next 3 upcoming events (see: Inserting gadgets).

If the event is set up with a guest registration option, registrant will be able to indicate the number of guests.

Next, the registrant will proceed with the transaction and complete the event registration.

After the registration, registrant (and administrator) receives a confirmation email that can be used to include additional event details.

Managing attendees

As people register for the event they will automatically be added to the attendees list of the event. At any time you can go to your event and see who have registered and what options they've chosen.

From here you can easily:

• Export your attendees into a spreadsheet file - use Viewing and contacting event attendees button. This can be used to create additional event reports.
• Send them a quick email
• Manually register or un-register attendees as needed - use Adding event attendees manually button. See Adding event attendees manually

Reports

In addition to Export option, each event has two built in reports:

• Registration by types report - will produce a summary of how many tickets you have sold and of what types (see Event payments report by registration type).
• Registration field report - can be used to plan your event ahead of time. For example, if you want to see how many people have ordered steak and how many fish. You can simply run this report and then order the required amount of food ahead of time (see Event registration report).

Managing event payments

When your event is set up with a payment option Wild Apricot will automatically generate the following financial records for each attendee:

• Invoice (see:Invoices - Overview)
• Payment record (see: Payments - Overview)
• all other additional transaction details will be logged in Audit log (see:Audit log)

Similar to your events, all financial records can be found under the Finances tab.

To see the financial transactions for a particular event just click on a Financial transactions link from the event details. This will take you to the Finances tab with financial records just for this particular event. From here you can review invoices, payment records and audit log.

• With the help of Financial reports you can analyze your financial transactions in more detail (see: Financial Reports).
• And you can also export your financial details into Quickbooks for further processing (see:Quickbooks).

Managing new contact information

When you offer an event for registration, the registration form will capture personal contact details such as First/Last names, E-mail, Organization, along with the event registration options (if added).

If the person is already one of your existing contacts then the new event registration will be simply added to it, no new contact will be added.

But if a new person registers, who is not yet in your database, a new contact will be created and added to your Contact list (that you can access from a Contacts tab).

Note, that each additional contact is counted against your overall account limit. See Pricing.

This allows you to capture new contacts and follow up with them later on. For example, you would be able to:

• Promote new events to past event attendees (by using automated event announcements)
• Send them other e-mails, such as newsletters, membership campaigns and other offers

Alternatively, if you do not wish to keep new contacts or need to stay within your account limit you can always archive and delete them after the event (see:Delete contact records).

Advanced event options

Offer events for preview but not registration

Sometimes, you might want to offer a preview of an upcoming event. To do this you only enable the event's visibility without enabling registration (see Event visibility )

Capping registrations

If you have events with limited spaces you can choose to cap your event to the specific number of registrations. When the registration number is reached the event registration will automatically stop.

Guest registration

You can also enable guest registrations - so that registrants can add additional people to the registration (with additional cost). For more details see Guest event registration.

Event tagging

Tags can be used to classify events. You can assign an unlimited number of categories to each event and afterwards you can find events using those tags as well as create event pages which filter events by category. See Event categories (tags, labels).

Show attendees list

Show attendee list option allows you to publish a list of people who have registered for an event (and selected this option) to encourage others to register, or to encourage networking, for example. You can allow registrants to list their name and a link to their public profile with the event.

Planned event enhancements

Things that come up in requests that are not currently available in Wild Apricot - but are on our roadmap:

• RSVP
• Recurring events
• limits per registration type and selection fields (for now limit applies to the entire event only)
• admin to process credit card for event registration from within Wild Apricot

  Note you can use our wishlist forum to browse and to add your own feature suggestions.

Additional resources

Before you can start accepting online registrations and payments, check the following options:

• Payment settings (Go to Settings tab / Payment settings)
  • if you accept online payments this is where you would set your payment processor. Note payment settings apply globally to entire site.
  • if you accept offline payments (e.g. by check or cache) you need to specify your Payment instructions for events so that people know how to send you funds (scroll to the bottom of Payment settings page)
• Default event e-mails - when you create a new event the system will use these email templates to create event specific e-mails. You can then adjust event specific e-mails directly from the event.