Think outside the box with CiviCRM: Innovative idea #10

Let your event registrants choose their participant role and automate communication based on their choice

An organization hosts events that can be attended either in person or via teleconference. During the registration process, the registrant chooses the preferred method of attendance. The event manager then needs to send different emails to the participants based on how they will attend the event in order to provide the necessary information such as parking instructions or a link to the teleconference.

This process is time consuming and prone to error, so this organization turned to Cividesk for help.

As the event fee is the same whether people attend in person or online, we couldn't make a distinction based on the event fee. We suggested to have participants select their method of attendance using the "Participant Role" - a standard CiviCRM field.

This allowed us the ability to configure the event with two different scheduled reminders based on the participant role that would be triggered two days before the event started:

1. Parking instructions for those who selected to the "In Person" role (i.e. who would physically attend the event)
2. Online conference credentials for those who selected the "Webcast" role (i.e. those who would attend the event via teleconference)

When the Participant Role field is exposed in an online registration form, CiviCRM lists ALL participant roles that have been configured in the back-office (e.g. Attendee, Speaker, Volunteer, etc.). To limit this list in the registration form to specific roles (e.g. "In Person" or "Webcast") without removing the ability to register a participant with another role (e.g. "Speaker") in the back office, we developed a customization that adds a visibility setting to the participant role configuration. Now users can select if a participant role will be visible publicly or just to admin users.

CiviCRM is a powerful tool for event configuration, but with multiple participant registrations, wait lists, pre-approval and event reminders, it can sometimes be difficult to configure an event correctly or with the most efficient workflow. Do you regularly have issues with event configuration? Would you benefit from professional support that would save precious staff time for your organization ?

Would you like to know more about how to implement this solution for your organization? Contact your Cividesk Account Manager and we will be happy to help.