Think outside the box with CiviCRM: Innovative idea #9

How can an event participant keep the relationship with his/her primary member?

Has this happened to you? When an individual registers for an event the relationship with his current employer becomes disabled and is replaced by another employer contact with a similar name!

If so: You might like to know that this is a typical situation for membership based organizations (ie. trade, alumni, etc.) who hold events.

Why it happens?  If the individual already exists in your database, when asked for the participant's current employer (default field in CiviCRM) during a registration process, there is a chance that the participant spells out his employer's name slightly differently from how the company contact was originally created in your database. For instance, they might register as employee of "CompanyABC", when their employer record in CiviCRM is actually "CompanyABC, Inc." As a result of this slight discrepancy, CiviCRM creates a new "employer" contact with an employer/employee relationship to the participant replacing the "actual" employer contact in CiviCRM which houses the history of other employees, membership records, and other donation information.

Why you should avoid this situation: Don't miss important data about that individual next time she or he interacts with your organization like not knowing they have a current membership from their employer (the original contact in Civi) and as a consequence, they might lose out on perks reserved to members such as discounted tickets to your next big event (which can be implemented with our Price Option Privacy extension).

How to avoid this issue: It's easy and this is our workaround - Stop using the default field "Current Employer" in event registration profiles and instead use a custom field to store the employer's name "as entered" by the participant.
Then you can use the custom field "Company name as entered" to include in a name badge or to track contacts who change companies and a way to reach out to potential new members.

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.