The name you choose is how the event will be referred to on your web pages. An event name should not contain a date since Self Signup Home and Admin Home show an event's date range automatically.
You can create self-signup instructions specific to your event if desired. If you do, there will be an "Instructions for this event" link at the top of its self-signup page.
After you create an event, you create its schedules, signup forms, messages, and reports. But because signup schedules are a rather specialized view of an event, you might want to also provide visitors to Self-Signup Home an overall description and timeline. To do so, use the Make Event Synopsis page.
When you create an event from scratch, you specify the number of setup days, public/during-event days, and takedown days that it has. However, the sum of these 3 numbers must not exceed a year. (On the other hand, the date of a planning activity can be up to 2 years before or after the start of an event).
All events have 1 or more public days — the days that people can attend the event. An Event's Public Start Date is the date of its 1st (or only) for-the-public day, and the dates shown for an event on Self-Signup Home and Admin Home are those of its 1st and last public day. Many events do not have whole days devoted to Setup or Takedown. But when they do, enter a value greater than 0 in those fields.
Notes:
You can provide the names of 1 to 3 people. Note that only someone in the people database can be identified. But you can register someone on the fly if necessary. If a staff person needs to modify the admin web pages, you must set the Admin privilege in her registration info. Otherwise you might want to consider giving her the Agent privilege instead.
PRESTO features related to the event chairs and the signups coordinator:
You can post the Chairperson job using the regular activity signup mechanism if desired. To do this, check the Set From Signup box. This will create a planning activity named Chair. Later when someone signs up for this activity, that person will be designated the event's chair. When this feature is used, the "What's Going On" table on Self-Signup Home shows whether the Chairperson job has been filled or not.
For some kinds of events, "chair" is not the best term for the chairperson role. For example, for a rotating party that has a different host for each party (i.e. each party is an event), "host" would be more appropriate than "chair". Similarly the default start date for the automatically-created activity, 2 weeks before the event, may not be appropriate now. To change these or other default settings, use Edit Activity and Edit Schedule Item.
Smart Check-in is intended for groups that want to check in "workers" as they arrive for an event. If it is turned on, a formal check-in period for a signup starts for users 60 minutes before the signup's schedule item starts. Prior to that, a "smart status" is logically Okay. When the check-in period starts, it is logically Open. If no check-in occurs by the time the schedule item ends, Status is set to No Show. (Note that Search supports the Open status. Thus during a check-in period, you can set an email's To-list to the people who have not checked in yet).
If you turn smart check-in on or off using Update Event Properties, the relevant signups are updated. Turning it on enables smart check-in for the current day and later. Turning it off sets each remaining "smart status" to a real Okay.
You can of course always set Status as desired, but the UI provides 2 levels of highlighting to facilitate doing check-ins:
Additionally you can set Display View->Signups to Show to Un-checked-in Signups. This causes a schedule to display only those signups that have not yet been given a "real" status. (Note: to see only the current day's signups, set Display View->Its Date to 0).
If Smart Check-in is set to Auto at Login, automatic check-in is also enabled. That is, when a user logs in (or revisits or refreshes Self-signup Home) during a signup's check-in period, she is checked in. More specifically:
A signup form is how people provide information when they signup (see the Make Signup Form page). Often many activities in an event have the same signup form. If that applies now, you might want to identify that form as this event's Default Form. This means that if an activity does not explicitly identify another signup form, the default form will be displayed when someone signs up for that activity.
Enter a Main Email Address if you want this address to be a choice in Email Announcement's From menu. Enter a Signups Email Address if you want the self-signup page's "questions?" link to identify it instead of coordinator's personal address. (Can be same as Main Email Address). If set, becomes a choice in Email Announcement's From menu.
If the event's activity names include locations with a common theme (e.g. precincts at an election), enter it in the UI Term for Location field. This will cause Location to be replaced with theme (e.g. Grid per Location would become Grid per Precinct in the Layout of View menu).
A frequently repeated event is one that occurs quarterly or more often (e.g. a bi-weekly meeting). For this kind of event, you normally want people to be able to signup for 1 or more meetings in advance.
In practice, this means:
The Repeats Frequently checkbox is a convenience feature for making these things easy to do. If you check it, the latest instance of a meeting in Admin Home's Event Table will contain a Create Next link. When a meeting is over, click on this link, fill out the dialog box as described below, and then click on the box's Create button. This will create an event with the indicated start date (and the same name as before).
(Note: this feature does for whole events about what the Rolling Events feature does for days).
Identify the event to copy in the How to Create dropdown menu. Usually this is your latest meeting. But if your next meeting has an agenda that is similar to some earlier meeting, select that one to copy instead. See the next section for more on this.
Identify when your next meeting is via the Start Date field:
If you want to receive an email message when it is time to do the next Create Next command, enter a number in the Email Reminder? field.
(Note: the default reminder is automatically sent when you create the 1st instance of a frequently repeated event).
When you click on the Create button, existing events in the series are affected as follows:
*If an instance of a repeating event has a different schedule than usual, you may want to create a new meeting's schedule from it at some point. If so, set its stage to Completed. As implied above, this will prevent it from being deleted.