Just the opposite. This would create a great deal of unnecessary work for you.
As well as being the permanent thing that resides at your group's web address (prestogem.com/vo/xxx), a group contains a database: everyone who has registered, your draft messages, your report definitions, and so on. In other words, creating a new group for each event would mean re-entering all this data each time you had an event.
Additionally because this database also contains all your events, schedules, and signups, you get the benefit of having a group history. You can quickly create a new event with the same sort of schedule as an earlier event (using Copy on the Create Event page). You can display the past work experience that people have (using reports or Search for People).
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Note that a PRESTO event can be used for essentially any real world thing you want signups for. It might be a meeting, a fundraiser, court reservations, worker shifts, a survey, and so on. It might be short as a day (as for a meeting) or roll on forever (as for court reservations). For more info on PRESTO terminology, see the Feature Basics link on Admin Home.
For people to see your schedule, its event must be set to Published (via its Stage dropdown menu on Admin Home).
To test the schedule out before that, login as an admin and go to Self-Signup Home. Notice that the schedule is italicized in the What's Going On table. This is how you know it is not published yet*. Now set the Enabled Privileges menu to Self Only and/or See All Signups, depending on the privilege levels you gave your users. When you visit the schedule, you will see exactly what real users will see**.
Notes: *If you ever want the What's Going On table itself to be exactly what real users see, set the List dropdown menu under the table to Published.
**However if you use conditional activities, different users see different schedule items. To test out a particular user's view, either set your roles to match hers or: 1) Do an Update Person for her and then immediately click the Cancel button. 2) Do a Register Person, click the Load Last link, and tweak the Name field, and then login as this dummy person.
The general idea is that you would create an event for each meeting. For each event, you would create a a signup schedule, and an Event Synopsis containing the meeting agenda. The signup schedule might be as simple as a single activity named Plan to Attend (or the like). Then in the future, you would use Search People or Output Report to display who attended when.
Because this is a recurning meeting, we suggest you check the Repeats Frequently box when you create the event for the 1st meeting. This will facilitate bookkeeping for your meetings (as described
here). In particular, it makes it easy to clone a later meeting from an earlier meeting and to setup a reminder for when this should be done.
Let's also suppose you want to allow people to plan up to 2 months ahead. Therefore after you have fully setup the 1st meeting, immediately click on create next one and fully setup your 2nd meeting as well. When you get the reminder mentioned in the previous paragraph, you should create the 3rd meeting — and so on for each successive reminder/meeting.
Managing meetings this way pays off the most for large meetings or when there are jobs beyond merely planning to attend. For example, maybe you need volunteers for reserving a room, getting refreshments, writing the agenda, being a speaker, and so on. If so, you would add these things to your signup schedule. Also if you need to keep track of who planned to attend and did not come, you can mark No Show on such signups.
Yes. To do this, register a "pretend person" whose name is the organization that is providing the people. As part of this, enter "sponsor" in the Roles field* of the registration form.
You can do regular signups of a sponsor of course, but the fastest way to signup a sponsor multiple times is often Top-of-page middle down-arrow->Add Multiple Schedule Items & Signups (while See/Do Signups is the current page). Simply enter the sponsor's name multiple times in the Who to Assign area of the box. Note that you later change an anonymous sponsor signup to a registered person: do an Update Signup and enter the person's name in the Give Spot To field.
If you want the Sponsor organization to be able to login and do its own signups, give it an email address when you register it.
-------- *If the Roles field is not enabled in your registration form, go to Customize Registration Form, click on Add Field, enter Roles as its name, and click on the Add or Extend button.
Yes, this is what Make Signup Form is for. Signup forms enable you to associate any fields you want to with a signup. Conversely you can include such fields in any reports that you create.
First create the form:
Select Create Form from the dropdown menu at the top of Make Signup Form.
Name the new form as desired.
You probably want to check the Is Default Form box (but see below as well*).
Click on Create Form
Now create the field:
Click on Add Field.
Make it a Text field.
Name it Notes or Comments or the like.
Choose how many lines tall you want it
If notes should be entered/seen only by administrators, select ADMIN-ONLY DIVIDER or later in the title line's dropdown menu. Otherwise set the User Can... dropdown menu to Enter It or View It, depending on whether users can create their own notes or only look at notes you create.
(If you need both user notes and admin-only notes, simply create two fields).
*By default, activities are associated with an event's default form. So if you want this to be the form of all activities and you checked the box mentioned above, you are done. Otherwise you need to tell PRESTO which activities this signup form is associated with. To do this, go to Manage Activities and use Select and Update to get things right.
When people are registered, they are assigned a privilege level. To allow the above, they should be given a privilege level of at least See All Signups*. When a person has See All Signups privilege or higher, there is a List All Signups link at the top right of the self-signup schedule. Additionally there is a checkbox on each schedule line (except in Calendar layouts). A click on such a checkbox will display all the signups for that schedule line.
If you still want some people to have a privilege level of Self Only, you can share specific information with them by using Email Announcement. For exmaple, you can send them reports or use Insert Recipient's->Coworkers or Teammates.
----- *If you will be doing an Import Database, you can do this for all your existing people at once by having a privs column in your import file. If you allow self-registration, you should make See All Signups the default privilege level (see the Configure Group page). You can also set this privilege individually via admin-Register or Update Registration.
If you want to list only these people, set current event as desired, goto Email Announcement, select Those Not Yet Signed Up from the 3rd TO-list pulldown menu, and click on Preview. If you will be doing this periodically, you should save the message in the Drafts folder as well.
You could also create a report that contains a Person's Name column and a Person's Signups column. You would tell who hasn't signed up for the current event by seeing what is in each person's Person's Signups column. If you have had just a few events, you could get by with Everyone in Database being the only is-about item. In general though, you should make the report be about: Everyone in Database, Per-Person Marker, Matches of Current Event.
