Over the last year, SYSTOPIA has developed a set of CiviCRM extensions to make event management with CiviCRM more efficient and easier for participants and staff. In the first part, we present three extensions that support invitations, communications and check-in.
After the non-public development phase, we have now made these three extensions publicly available. There is not yet a stable version for all extensions - we are of course happy to receive support for further development and publication. Also, our development work is only partly financed by projects, so future users are welcome to show their solidarity with a small contribution ;-)
In the next part, we will present our new toolbox for connecting external Drupal-based event portals to CiviCRM.
Event Invitation
If you want to invite a group of contacts to an event and make it easy for them to accept or decline, the Event Invitation extension is a helpful tool.
From a normal contact search, you create an invitation email with a link or a pdf invitation letter with a QR code via a search result action. Both direct the invitees to a web form with which they can submit their acceptance or rejection.
To ensure that this process is also tracked in the system, the invitees are added to the event with the status "Invited". Depending on the reaction via the web form, the status changes to "Registered" or "Canceled".
Event Invitation extension on GitHub.
Event Messages
As is well known, CiviCRM is able to confirm registration for an event by e-mail as standard. However, anyone who has ever dealt with the corresponding message template in order to adapt it to their own wishes knows that this is anything but simple. This is because the logic for all case distinctions is packed into a single template, making it very confusing and difficult to edit.
To make managing event communication more user-friendly, we have developed the Event Messages extension. For each individual event, it can be used to conveniently define rules that trigger the sending of messages when the participation status changes.
As a little extra, the extension offers a search result action for document generation and e-mail dispatch, where all tokens for event and registration are available.
Event Messages extension on GitHub.
Event check-in
Larger face-to-face events like conferences - that sounds a bit strange at the moment, but it will be back in the not too distant future. And with them the problem of managing the rush of visitors at the conference check-in. This has become a lot easier with the CiviCRM extension Event Check-in.
In combination with Event Messages, this extension allows you to generate QR codes for the check-in, which are sent to the participants with the registration confirmation or separately as an entry ticket. When registering, only the corresponding QR code needs to be scanned and the registration confirmed in order to update the participation status.
Event Check-in extension on GitHub.
UPDATE: Documentation for the Custom Event Communications extension is now available here.
