Event registration forms create constituents - I want participants

Mergen Peries · August 2018

Does anyone know how to make OLX event reg forms create or link to participant records?

Some events have people who don't need to be constituents in RE. So ideally I would just load them into an event as participants. But If I use the event forms to allow online registrations to that event, every online registration will try to make me match to a constituent. This effectively means I can't use OLX event reg forms, because I don't want to create a whole bunch of constituents for a one off event.

Stephanie Keene · August 2018

Mergen Peries:

Does anyone know how to make OLX event reg forms create or link to participant records?

Some events have people who don't need to be constituents in RE. So ideally I would just load them into an event as participants. But If I use the event forms to allow online registrations to that event, every online registration will try to make me match to a constituent. This effectively means I can't use OLX event reg forms, because I don't want to create a whole bunch of constituents for a one off event.

Are you processing event payments or are they just free registrations? You have to have constituent records to process the payments which are the only type of OLX event transactions I've processed, so through the batch process I added new constituents (if needed, otherwise matched it to an existing record). I don't think there was a way to make an event registration a guest on an existing record which would be the only other entry to have a participant record.

Mergen Peries · August 2018

Thanks Stephanie. Good question about payments, I should have said. I am talking mainly about free registrants. Makes sense for paid registrants to have a full constituent record.

Yeah that's the only way I've seen OLX create participant only records, when people are guests.

Maybe use OLX and use the transaction info tab to update the Event tab manually? Hardly ideal, but the only way I see to leverage the time saved in offloading email/phone queries to online.

Faith Murray · August 2018

There could be another non-traditional option. Create an "Event Dummy" constituent record in RE, and when processing gifts, link registrations to that record. I did something equivalent with Tributes for OLX. I believe that each time a registration is downloaded the Events module will enter a new "Dummy" participant with the appropriate attributes, which would then need re-named. You would need to test this, however, to make sure it really would work this way without messing up the Attributes.

Mergen Peries · August 2018

Intriguing work-around! I tried it - so it creates the participant record as you would expect, for the dummy cons. Ideally, at this point, I would like to overwrite the bio info the participant record, and break the link to the cons record. But the name and binoculars are grayed out/disabled, so you can't edit at all.

Thanks for the idea though. Hopefully NXT solves this - better post an idea, quick!