Recurring events or classes - how to record attendance
In this article:
Overview
This article describes solutions for recording attendance at a series of classes or workshops.
The regular Events module in LGL doesn't function well for classes or when you are working with many events. It is labor-intensive to set up many events, and reporting across them is time-consuming because you need to define columns in your report for each distinct event. However, LGL does offer options that work well for tracking attendance or participation in a large number of events:
In the example used in this article, our organization runs a series of mentor workshops, one per month. We want to record who attended each of the monthly workshops.
Custom categories
Constituent categories offer a very simple way to record whether someone participated in an event. Your category name should represent a set of events, and then each value in that category would represent a separate event within that umbrella.
In our example, the category name is "2020 Mentor Meetings", and there is one value for each month. If someone attended in January, they will have that tag in their constituent record.
Besides being simple to implement, this approach is nice in that it provides great visibility into your attendance numbers, right on your Constituent home page. You can run reports to show attendees by searching for people with values from this category, and in your report you can include the category values as columns.
Notes
Notes are a versatile way to record information on a constituent's record. A note consists of three parts:
- Note type: A categorization for the note (defaults to "General")
- Note date: The date associated with the note (defaults to today's date)
- Note text: Open text field (required to be populated, but you could put in a "1" or something simple)
By customizing note types, you can search for people with a specific type of note in their constituent records.
In the constituent's record, you can record the date of the event (using the date of the note) and include any details about the event, specific to the constituent.
Recurring events
This option requires LGL to turn on a custom attribute in your account. To request that recurring events be turned on in your account, please use the Help page form in your account to request activation.
When this option is turned on, you can then make a specific event recurring by checking the Is recurring box when you add or edit the event:
To add multiple instances of attendance, click Actions in the constituent’s event record and select Edit invitation.
When the event record is open, select Add attendance and enter the date the constituent attended the event. Add attendance dates for each instance. Save the record.
Within recurring events, you can record multiple attendances for a single constituent to an event. LGL records the date of each attendance. This solution is handy when you want to be able to look at all your event data in one place.
You can also search on "Attendance Count" in a constituent search to find people who have attended a recurring event a certain number of times.
Limitations to using recurring events
You should be aware of some limitations when using recurring events.
- It is not possible to record event attributes per attendance date. For example, if your event has a custom field for participation notes, that field will appear only one time in your event, not once for each attendance date. If you want to capture notes like that for each attendance, you would be better off using Notes.
- If you merge two records together, event invitation details will not merge. (This is also true for regular events.)