Getting Started with Events in ActivistCentral

ActivistCentral Events gives your organization a central place to create events, accept registrations, manage participants, and track attendance.

You can use Events for meetings, trainings, conferences, conventions, fundraisers, community events, and other activities your organization needs to organize.

View your events

Go to Events under Programs in the main navigation.

The Events page gives you a summary of your organization's event activity, including:

• Total events
• Upcoming events
• Participants
• Attendance
• A list of your draft, published, completed, and cancelled events

Select an event to view its details and registrations, or choose Add Event to create a new event.

Create an event

Select Add Event from the Events page.

Creating an event is divided into four steps:

1. Info
2. Details
3. Registration
4. Fees

Step 1: Add event information

On the Info step, enter the basic information about your event.

Event title is required.

You can also enter an optional Event type, such as Conference, Training, Fundraiser, Meeting, or another description that makes sense for your organization.

Add a Description to provide additional information about the event.

Then choose the event's start date and time. You can also provide an end date and time.

Choose an event status

The event's status controls where it is in its lifecycle.

A new event can begin as a Draft while you are still preparing it.

Draft events are internal. Staff can work on them, but the public cannot view or register for them.

When an event is ready for registration, it can be Published.

Events may also become Completed after they occur or Cancelled if they will no longer take place.

Completed events retain their registration roster and attendance information, but new public registrations are no longer accepted.

Add a location

The Details step lets you specify where the event will take place.

If the location already exists in your Org Directory, you can search for and select that organization.

You can also enter a custom location using:

• Venue name
• Street address
• City
• State or province
• ZIP or postal code
• Country

This makes it possible to use an existing organization as a venue or enter a location specifically for the event.

Enable online registration

On the Registration step, turn on Enable online registration if you want people to register through a public registration form.

Once registration is enabled and the event is available for public registration, ActivistCentral provides a registration link that you can share with attendees.

The public registration form collects information about the person submitting the registration and the people who will actually attend.

A registrant can:

• Enter their name and email
• Provide an optional phone number and notes
• Indicate that they are also attending the event
• Add one or more additional attendees

This allows one person to register multiple participants when needed.

Registrants and participants are different

ActivistCentral distinguishes between the registrant and the participants attending the event.

For example, an office administrator could submit one registration for several members of their organization without attending the event personally.

If the registrant is attending, they can select I am also attending this event.

Additional attendees are entered separately. An attendee's email address is recommended when available, but it is not required.

This distinction helps ActivistCentral maintain an accurate participant roster and event capacity even when one person registers on behalf of several people.

Participant capacity

If you set a capacity for an event, ActivistCentral counts the number of participants, rather than the number of registration submissions.

For example, if one person submits a registration for four attendees, those four people count toward the event's capacity.

This is especially useful for conferences, trainings, conventions, and other events where organizations may register multiple people at once.

Event fees

The final Fees step includes the option to mark an event as a paid event.

Paid-event support is currently configuration only. ActivistCentral can identify an event as paid, but event payment processing is not currently handled through the Events registration workflow.

Leave This is a paid event turned off for events that do not require a fee.

When you're finished configuring the event, select Create Event.

Manage your event

After creating an event, open it from the Events page to view its details.

The event page shows information such as:

• Event status
• Date and time
• Capacity
• Public registration availability
• Registration link, when available
• Registration and participant totals
• Participant roster
• Attendance

Staff can also use Edit Event to make changes or Add Registration to enter a registration directly.

For published events with online registration available, share the public registration link with the people or organizations you want to invite.

After the event

Once an event has occurred, ActivistCentral can keep the event and its roster available as part of your organization's history.

Completed events no longer accept new public registrations, but staff can continue working with the roster and recording attendance.

This makes the event record useful both before the event and after it has taken place.

For more information about working with registrations, linking participants to Contacts, and recording attendance, see Managing Event Registrations and Attendance in ActivistCentral.