Online Events and Ticket Sales

eTapestry Best Practices: The Event Registration DIY form allows you to sell tickets to an event online to make it easy for your donors to purchase their tickets and for you to gather their information. DIY forms also have a responsive design, so your donors can use their mobile device to submit.

You can send an email message to direct recipients to your website where a prominent link points them to an event registration form. Your attendee could then sign up for the event right from the website by filling out a web based registration form. This form can be as customized as you like, from colors to pictures to anything else. This kind of form is highly effective in collecting and standardizing participant data. Since the information can be passed directly from the website into eTapestry, you eliminate the need to re-enter data and can begin generating reports immediately.

Based on real time registrations, up to the minute reports can be printed, name tags can be generated, and seating assignments can be updated.

One of the biggest advantages is the ability to process registration fees and/or donations online. Although this can be set up as a payment option for the event, the ability to collect funds immediately provides more current reporting and less worry about when the attendee might pay. eTapestry can provide the ability to collect, process, verify, and send an email to the donor confirming a registration made with a credit card. These payments are then automatically recorded in the donor’s journal.

Often times event coordinators may want to get additional information from those attendees who have registered for their event. Your eTapestry online form can ask specific questions created by the coordinator, who can also determine the format of the answers, such as offering choices or selections, entering free text, or selecting yes or no. This information can apply to the current event or be more general information on the donor. This data is automatically recorded by eTapestry in the donor’s record and is available for query, reporting and analysis.

If this will be your first DIY form, please review the Getting Started Toolkit before you move forward.

Before you create your event DIY forms, you should set up basic event track fields. If you haven’t already, see Event Tracking Part 1: So You're Having an Event?

Setting Up User Defined Fields

Before you start setting up an Event DIY form you will need to create the fields that you will to add to the form. Here are some examples of fields you could create:

Each organizations needs for fields are unique, but there are some best practices that you can follow to make sure you’re creating the fields in a way that will be meaningful once they are added to the database. For more information, refer to Best Practices for Creating User-Defined Fields.

Creating the Event DIY Form

Now that you have all of your fields set up, we can start creating your Event Registration DIY Form. The Event Registration page allows you to sell multiple types of tickets for the same event. For example, if you will have an “Adult Ticket” and “Child Ticket” that will each have different prices, you can add each ticket type to the form, and the donor can fill in how many of each they want to purchase. The total will calculate based on how much each ticket costs and how many they want.

The settings of your form are very important; this is where you tell the form how you would like gifts to be entered into eTapestry when the donor submits. You can utilize the same approach for tickets we created to mark all submissions on this form with that value. That way, you can know later on how you gathered the money.

Within the settings, you can also utilize hidden fields to mark the submissions as tickets for that specific event. In this example, we are having an event called “Kristin's Dinner Party,” so that value has been marked. Hidden fields allow you to decide how the transaction is marked without having the donor click anything on the form. For more information, watch this short video on how to use hidden fields to mark submissions as tickets for an event.

After configuring your general settings, you can start adding the Tickets field and other user defined fields you created so the donor can see them on the form. For more information, you can view videos on:

 

Resources

Special Events

User-Defined Fields

Add a user-defined field

System-Defined Fields

Add and rename system-defined field values

Create Ticket Quantity field for DIY forms