Breeze Article

Creating an Event with Breeze Events

Breeze Events is designed to provide an easy-to-use, advanced, registration, notification and reporting system to support your online event goals. Typically, customers initiate events to increase and qualify potential leads, train and announce wide-reaching news (like product launches, public relations, earnings reports, etc.). The Events application makes it easy to invite large groups of people, post custom registration pages and open those pages to as few or as many people as you like. You can then take all the information about individuals who were invited, registered and attended to determine their level of interest in your message. Below are some tips on creating an event.

Event Setup

Setting up an event requires consideration. Do you want to post a link on your website to a registration page so the whole world can register? Do you want registration to be perpetual or do you want it available only for one period in time? How many people do you want to attend and which ones should be pre-approved? Below are some tips to help understand best practices for setting up an event.

Figure 5: Examples of making a folder public and private.

1. Determine whether you want this event to be accessible using a public URL or accessible only privately to invited people. Once you have decided, create a new event in a folder that represents your desire for one of the two options (Image 5).

   Note: A best practice is to name your folders based on whether they are public or private. You may also create every event in a private folder, and then move it to a public one, once you are comfortable with having it public. This gives you the opportunity to provide selective registration before opening the event publicly.

   

   Figure 6: Event information page.

2. Name the event the same as the content it is representing (Image 6 – A).
3. Set a unique URL that maps to the content (Image 6 – B).
4. Use the summary description to provide all the information that will incline a person to register as this is what is displayed to potential registrants before they continue with registration. It is designed to give enough information to make people interested, but not burden a public listing with too much information. This should include speaker information, and so on. In short, be brief in this field (Image 6 – C).
5. Use approval only if you are concerned about a URL being passed around or are placing registration access to the public through your website (Image 6 – D).
6. When creating the registration, try to be brief. You can ask as many questions as you like, but most registrants have a limit to how long they will spend registering for an event. Ask your key questions and place them above the fold for better response.
7. Check and recheck your e-mail lists before attempting to import them. This is so you can ensure that you don’t have any erroneous email addresses, you do not send emails to someone who has opted out of receiving them from you, and you have correctly formatted the CSV.

8. Set up both your invitations and reminders prior to publishing the event. You may customize the messages however you choose and specify the time when you want them sent.

   Note: An e-mail best practice is to set your email invitations to go out at least one day later than your intended publish date. Once you publish an event you cannot unpublish it. But you can arrange to send the email invitations later so as not to have people view your event should anything be wrong.

   

   Figure 7: Example of an event preview of registration page.

9. Preview all your event information prior to publishing the event (Image 7).
10. You may choose to use Macromedia Contribute to further customize the registration pages.

Publishing an Event

Once you have thoroughly reviewed your public pages and e-mail options, and locked the meeting room (if you are using one), then you may publish. The best practice for publishing is to always publish in a Private folder first. Once you have viewed it live and it meets your satisfaction, you may either move the event to a public folder, making it available on your website, keep it private for a limited time, to create the notion of exclusivity which may boost email receptivity, or simply keep the event private (see Image 5)..

Pre-Event/Post-Publish Activities

Prior to conducting a live event, the event coordinator should ensure proper notifications have been sent at the appropriate times. Response to registrations is often a direct result of the amount of work that went into creating a meaningful message and getting it out to the public. Some best practices in this stage include:

1. Once your first reminders are sent, going back into the application and scheduling a second reminder closer to the event date.
2. Changing the Event Summary and Event Detail one week prior to registration closing to create more buzz around the message.
3. Using reminders to send people to the Pre-event layout (if you have a concurrent usage or an enterprise-wide license account) to allow them to learn more about the event. No webmaster needed!

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