Whether you run fundraising dinners, challenge event runs, or full conferences, Beacon can help you organise the vital information about them. You'll be able to set up a form where attendees can register or buy tickets, manage your attendees, allocate donations associated with your events, and designate campaigns to promote them.
Contents:
Note: If you're wanting to manage events and attendance with Beacon you'll need the Events & ticketing element. You can add this from Settings > Billing > Change my plan.
If you'd like a trial of this element, reach out to our support team who can enable that for you!
How events work in Beacon
The Events record is where you'd store the information of the event itself: Start and end dates, the type of event it is, the location, website link, etc.
Linked to each Event are Event attendees. These are the linked records of people who are coming to the event. They might be people who are going to volunteer, they may be participants, or they may be guests of a fundraiser. You can then store event specific information about them - which table they will sit at, what their race number is, a t-shirt size or style, what kind of pass they have, etc. The one person may attend many events, and they will have an attendee record for each.
If you collect event registrations via a Beacon event registration form then you will also create Ticket records. A ticket can be for multiple attendees (e.g. a Family ticket) or just for a single attendee. Just like buying tickets to the cinema or a show, someone can purchase multiple tickets with one payment from an event registration form.
Note: The best way to think of the difference between Ticket and Event attendee records is that a ticket represents a ticket which has been purchased and the event attendee record represents a person who is actually going to the event. For example, one ticket for a table at a pub quiz can have 4 event attendees.
Creating an event
Creating an event works like creating any other record in Beacon. Simply go to the Events record type in the sidebar and click Add event.
Enter some details of the event like the name, start and end dates, and the type of event it is, then click Create. Done!
Note: Have a recurring event? It's best to create an event record for every instance of the event. e.g. Beacon Marathon 2020, Beacon Marathon 2021, etc.
Adding people to events
Using an event registration form
Collecting event registrations via a Beacon form is usually the go-to method for setting up your ticket options and getting your event attendees into your Beacon database. It's automated, and lets you collect the information you need to successfully run your event. All the data flows through to the right places, no data entry needed!
There's a full guide to event registration forms to take you through all the details, but here's a quick reminder:
Click Forms in the sidebar.
Click Create form.
Choose Event registration from the dropdown, and type in the Event you'd like to register people for.
Click Create.
Customise your form, click Save form to save any changes you make.
Click View form to see the finished product! Copy the URL to add to links in campaigns or to add to your website.
Note: The events registration form is part of the Events & Ticketing element -you'll need to ensure this is enabled to be able to select it from the form options.
Manually adding people to events
You won't want to add your whole database to an event (usually!), you'll just want particular people. To add them, you create an Event attendee that is linked to both the Person, and the Event. There's a few different ways to do this; individually, in bulk, or importing from a spreadsheet. Sometimes you will want to create Ticket records for them too, but we'll come to that later.
Adding individuals from the person record:
On the Person record, find the event card and click the '+'. You'll see that the person is pre-filled.
Start typing the name of the event to add them to, and click the relevant event.
Click the Create button.
Adding individuals from the event record:
On the Event record, find the attendees card and click the '+'. You'll see that the event is pre-filled.
Start typing the name of the Person to link to, and click the relevant person.
3. Click the Create button.
Add multiple people with bulk actions:
On the Person record, filter for the people you would like to add to the event. For example, people that are interested in volunteering.
Tick the 'Select all' checkbox.
Click the bulk actions menu (the three little dots!), and click Create related records.
Choose Event attendees from the create record type dropdown.
Click + Add field, select Event, and choose the event you would like to link your event attendees to. You can add any other info you want all the new records to have also.
Click Create and you'll get some shiny new event attendees!
Check out more about bulk creation of related records.
Adding people from a spreadsheet:
If you have an external list of people who you'd like to add as event attendees you can import the attendees with import templates:
Click on Imports and Manage templates in your sidebar.
Click Create template, and choose Event attendees from the record type drop down.
Upload your CSV file as an example.
Click each column header to map that column to a field in Beacon.
Warning: To properly create event attendees, you will need a unique value for the Person record (not name, as two people can have the same name!). We recommend email address, or the Beacon 'Record ID' if you've exported these people from Beacon.
Note: Any of the person's personal details should be mapped to the Person: Name, email, address, Record ID. Anything relating to their event participation should be mapped to the Event attendee: Type, t-shirt size, registration status.
In the fixed data section, in the Event attendees section, set the Event that the import is for (this will assign all these new event attendees to the same event). You could also add other data that is the same for everyone you're importing; e.g. the 'Type' as 'Participant'.
Set your deduplication field for the Person records (so that if a person exists already, it will link them rather than create them again). This should be information that is unique, such as email address or Record ID.
Click the Save changes button.
Navigate to Run import in the sidebar.
Choose the template you created in the dropdown menu.
Upload your CSV. Beacon will check that the columns match those in your template.
Click Start import. When your import is complete (it will take a few moments depending on the size of your import) you'll get a success message.
You'll now have some new Event attendees, as well as new Person records for anyone who didn't already exist in your database.
Assign payments to an event
It can be super useful to see the money you've raised from a particular event, whether it's from donations from participants or donations in person from people at the event itself. Some payments can be automatically linked to an event via forms, and others you might want to set up in an import template.
Note: This is different from adding a payment for a ticket. If you want to do this then you should create a Ticket record and assign the payment to that record.
Automatically link payments from forms
Many charities will set up an event-specific donation form to have a tailored donation experience, and to automatically assign those donations to the relevant event.
Once you've set up your form, use the fixed data section to choose the appropriate event to link to.
Link payments from import templates
When adding payments to Beacon via an import, you can use fixed data to set the event that those payments are related to.
Assign payments manually
Individually:
On the payment record, type in the event it's associated with. Done!
Bulk update:
In the payments list view, filter or search for the payments you'd like to relate to your event. Select all, or select individual payments, then click the bulk actions menu (those three dots).
Choose Update payments, choose Event as the field to update, and type in the relevant event.
Click Update, and all selected payments will now point at your event.
You can easily view all payments associated with an event by checking the Payments card on the Events record itself.
