Transcript
Hi, I'm Picky Apricot Steve Andrews and I'm going to show you how to set up events on your Wild Apricot site.
With Wild Apricot's events module, you can set up any number of events and publish them in an events calendar on your Wild Apricot site (or another website). From the events calendar, visitors can view event details, sign up for events, register guests, and pay registration fees online.
You can organize various types of events, including conventions, conferences, and seminars, board meetings, training sessions and webinars, and social events.
You can restrict each event to selected membership levels, and set up multiple registration types so you can charge different prices for different event packages or for different kinds of attendees
Setting up an event
To create and manage your Wild Apricot events, you go to the Events tab.
You can manage an existing event by clicking on it within the list. To add a new event, you click the Add event button. You can create the new event from scratch, or copy an existing event to use as the basis for the new one.
After you've created or copied the event, the Event details screen appears. From here, you specify the event name, location, date, and cost, and control whether visitors to your site can see and register for the event. Within the description, you can add and format text, and insert pictures and links.
If you have events with limited space, you can choose to cap your event to a specific number of registrations. When the registration number is reached, event registration will be automatically disabled.
Tags can be used to categorize events. You can assign an unlimited number of tags to each event and use those tags to limit the kinds of events appearing on your event calendar page. For example, you might want separate calendars for training and social events.
For each event, you can choose whether to publish a list of registrants. Doing so may promote networking or encourage others to register. You can control whether the attendees list is visible to all visitors or just members, and whether the list includes pending registrations (for which payment has not yet been received).
Customizing the registration form
You can customize the registration form for an event by adding, removing, and reordering event fields. You can add event fields to collect event-specific information and even up-sell some extra options to your registrants. For example, you can add an event field for meal selection, and another to offer preferred seating. Depending on how you set up the field, an additional cost can be added at checkout.
Event fields are combined with common fields from your contact database to form the event record and populate the registration form.
Setting up registration types
For each event, you must set up at least one registration type before you can enable an event for registration. Setting up registration types allows you to charge different prices for different event packages or for different kinds of attendees. For example, you might want to charge more for non-members, or less for premium members.
You can enable guest registrations so that registrants can register other people when they submit their own registration. You can choose to collect contact information for each guest or just ask for the total number of guests. You can also choose whether to charge a special price for guests.
You can offer early-bird discounts by making a registration type only available up to a certain date.
Customizing event emails
For each event, you can set up various announcements to automatically emailed to contacts in your database who aren't yet registered. You can also provide for registration confirmations to be automatically sent once a contact registered, and for event reminders to be emailed a certain number of days before the event.
You can customize the various event emails by adding text, formatting, graphics,and links to each message. To personalize the message, you can use macros to insert specific information such as the recipient's first name or organization.
If you include similar content in emails for different events, you can modify the default event emails to include the shared content.
You can schedule event announcements to be automatically delivered a certain number of days before the event, or you can manually send them at any time.
For each event, you can designate an event organizer who will receive copies of – and replies to – all event emails.
Now that you've set up your registration types, you can enable registration.
Adding an event calendar page
So that visitors to your site can see your events and register for them, you need to add at least one event calendar page to your website – and make the page accessible to non-administrators.
You can customize the event calendar by adding introductory text, choosing the default view, and controlling what type of events are included.
You can set up multiple event calendar pages, each displaying a different set of events (for example, member only vs. public events).
Online payments and taxes
If you want to be able to accept online payments for event registrations, you go to Settings and provide the details of your online payment system. Note that Wild Apricot does not charge any fees per registration or per transaction. Your only payment to Wild Apricot is a flat monthly fee for your Wild Apricot account.
If you're required to collect sales taxes or value-added taxes, you can set them up to be automatically applied to membership invoices and event invoices.
Registering for an event
Once an event is set up and online registration is enabled, it will appear on your event calendar page in your Wild Apricot site – where your visitors to your site can view details and register for the event.
After selecting a registration type, registrants fill out the registration form, and select any additional event options. If the event is set up with a guest registration option, the registrant will be able to indicate the number of guests. Then, unless the event is free, registrants proceed with online payment of the registration fee.
Registrants are automatically added to the attendees list – and the contact database, if they're not already there. Wild Apricot will automatically generate an invoice and payment record for each attendee. Wild Apricot can also automatically send event registration emails and payment receipts, as well as a notification to site administrators and event organizers.
Tracking registrations
To check how registration is proceeding for your event, you can view a list of registrants. You can search within the list, filter it by registration status, and sort it by registration date, attendee name, or registration type. You can export the list to Excel for customized printing or reporting.
You can view the details of individual registrations by clicking registrants within the list.
For a breakdown of event payments, you can generate a payments report that lists the number of attendees, the amount collected, and the amount owing, broken down by registration type.
If your event registration form includes options such as meal choices or special seating, you can generate a registration fields report summarizing the choices made by event registrants.
As we have seen, Wild Apricot provides a number of options to help you set up and manage events.
For more information, see Wild Apricot’s online help or contact our support department.
Thanks for listening. I hope this was helpful.