Managing Event Registrations and Attendance in ActivistCentral

Once an event has been created, ActivistCentral gives your team a central place to manage registrations, participants, Contacts, and attendance.

This guide explains how the event roster works and how to keep it accurate before, during, and after an event.

Open an event

Go to Events under Programs and select the event you want to manage.

The event page shows the event's current status, schedule, capacity, public registration availability, and registration information.

Under Registrations, the Roster summarizes:

• Registrations
• Participants
• Attended
• No-show

The roster lists the individual people expected to attend the event.

Registrations and participants

ActivistCentral treats a registration and a participant as two different things.

A registration is the signup submitted for the event.

A participant is a person who is actually expected to attend.

This distinction is important because one registration can include multiple participants.

For example, an office administrator could register three coworkers for a training. That would create one registration with three participants.

The person submitting the registration does not have to attend. If they are attending, they can be included as a participant too.

Event capacity is based on participants rather than the number of registration submissions.

Public registrations

When online registration is enabled for a published event, people can register using the event's public registration form.

The person submitting the form provides their name and email and can optionally provide a phone number and notes.

They can then:

• Select I am also attending this event if they will participate
• Enter information for another attendee
• Use Add another attendee to register additional people

An attendee's own email address is recommended when available, but it is not required.

When someone is registering other people, they should use each attendee's own email address when they have it rather than reusing the registrant's email address.

Add a registration as staff

Your team can also add registrations directly from inside ActivistCentral.

Open the event and select Add Registration.

This is useful when a registration comes in through another method or when staff need to add participants directly rather than sending someone through the public registration form.

The resulting participants appear on the same event roster as participants from public registrations.

Work with the participant roster

The Roster gives staff a participant-level view of the event.

For each participant, you can review their information, see whether they are connected to an ActivistCentral Contact, and update their attendance.

Depending on the participant, you may also see information about who submitted the registration.

This makes it possible to distinguish the person who registered from the people who are actually attending.

Link a participant to a Contact

An event participant does not have to be an existing ActivistCentral Contact.

When a participant is not linked, the roster shows Not linked and provides options for working with that person.

Select Link to Contact to connect the participant with an existing Contact in your organization's database.

Once linked, the Contact's name appears in the roster.

If a participant is linked to the wrong Contact, use Change Contact to correct the connection.

Linking participants to Contacts helps connect event activity with the people your organization already tracks in ActivistCentral.

Create a Contact from a participant

If an unlinked participant should become a Contact in ActivistCentral, select Create Contact.

This lets your team create a Contact using the participant's information rather than entering the person separately from the Contacts directory.

Not every event participant needs to become a Contact. Your organization can decide which attendees belong in its contact database.

Edit attendee information

Select Edit attendee from the roster when participant information needs to be corrected or updated.

This is useful for fixing names, updating attendee details, or correcting information supplied during registration.

Editing the attendee updates the event participant record.

Record attendance

The Attendance field on the roster lets staff record what happened for each participant.

Use it to update participants as your organization processes attendance for the event.

The roster summary updates the event's Attended and No-show counts as attendance is recorded.

Because attendance remains available after an event is completed, your team can update the roster during the event or finish entering attendance afterward.

Import attendance from a CSV

For larger events, you can use Import Attendance CSV instead of updating every participant individually.

This is useful when attendance has been collected through another process and needs to be brought back into ActivistCentral.

Open the event and select Import Attendance CSV from the Roster section to begin the attendance import process.

Review your attendance data carefully before importing it so that it corresponds to the participants registered for the event.

Completed events

When an event is Completed, new public registration is no longer available.

The event record and roster remain available to staff.

Your team can continue to:

• Review registrations and participants
• Link participants to Contacts
• Create Contacts when appropriate
• Correct attendee information
• Record or update attendance
• Review attendance and no-show totals

This allows ActivistCentral to preserve the event as part of your organization's history instead of treating the event as finished and inaccessible once its date has passed.

Keeping event records useful

For the most useful event history, review the roster after an event and make sure participant information and attendance are accurate.

Link participants to existing Contacts when appropriate, create new Contacts when your organization wants to keep an ongoing relationship with an attendee, and record attendance so your team can see who actually participated.

For information about creating an event, setting its location, enabling online registration, and configuring capacity, see Getting Started with Events in ActivistCentral.