Checklists

Top-Down Initial Setup 

Before anything else:

1. Click on the Guided Tour and UI Basics links.
2. Decide your group's security policies. Then use Configure Group to setup your password, privilege-level, and self-registration policies.

Populate your people database:

1. Read this overview.
2. Customize your registration form as desired.
3. If you are going to use Import People, specify privilege levels in the import file as desired.
4. Use Import People and/or use admin-Register Person and/or solicit self-registrations.

When you run your first event:

1. Use Create Event to get going.
2. Then do the Running-an-Event checklist.

   (Some of its items will be real quick if you can base your new event on a sample event).

Make your website public (optional*):

1. Use Configure Group to setup the page trim you want (e.g. your group logo).
2. Tell people how to access your site.

*This becomes required if you decide to allow people to self-register, do self-signups, view event schedules, or view signups done on their behalf.

Running-an-Event checklist 

Build a signup procedure:

1. Review these design considerations.
2. Click on Make Signup Schedule. Then create the event's signup schedule(s). As part of this (or from Manage Activities), create the activities people can signup for.
3. If you have info you want people to supply when they signup, use Make Signup Form to create and update a form for entering this data.
4. Click on Setup Auto-Messages. Then specify which actions send a confirmation message to the affected person. If desired, customize the auto-messages themselves.

Setup desired info sharing:

1. If you want to provide instructions on the event's self-signup page, enter them on the Update Event Properties page.
2. If you want to provide people the big picture of what goes on at your event, use Make Event Synopsis.
3. If you want reports about the signups you get, create them using Make/Output Report.

Solicit and manage signups:

1. If/when you want to allow self-signups, set the event's web stage to Published.
2. Announce your event, as described here. If desired, save a draft for later use.
3. Later, use Email Announcement to send everyone a reminder (or use it to schedule automatic reminders).

When the event is over:

1. If desired, use Email Announcement to send Thank You notes to everyone who helped out.
2. Update event's Web Stage when/if desired.

PRESTO's Factory Settings

Group Configuration:

• Passwords. 4+ letter passwords required, and admin-registers create a default password.
• Self-registration. Allowed.
• Initial privilege-level. Self-only.
• Group-specific bottom-of-page links. None.
• Top-left corner logo. The PRESTO logo.
• Special email addresses. None.
• Pre-defined reports. Badges, Postal Addresses, and Sign-in Sheet.

Registration from:

• Public fields: Person's Name*, Email Address, Phone Numbers, Postal Address.
• Admin-only fields: Membership Expiration date, Privilege Level*.
• Roles field and Representing registration fields turned off.

Event-related:

• Confirmation and notification messages. Do them for self-signups but not self-cancels. Do them for all admin signup actions and Allow Editing.
• Signup form. Just person's name.
• Event synopsis. None.

Populating Your People Database

Initially there are no people in your database. You need to populate your database because only registered people can be signed up. It is also what enables people to login.

If your group has a computerized list of past volunteers or the like, you can use Import People to get this list into PRESTO all at once. For other people, you and/or the people themselves will have to do Register Person commands to enter this data.

Either way, beforehand you need to think about privileges, your registration form, and the Roles registration field; and afterwards, you need to tell your users about your PRESTO website.

Importing Non-default Privileges

Suppose you are planning to do an Import. Suppose further you know who in the import file should get an initial privilege level different than the one setup in Configure Group. If so, you might want to set their privilege levels within the import file so that you do not have to do Update Person commands afterwards.

Customizing your Registration Form

Before you populate your database, you need to decide if you want to customize your registration form. You might want to:

• Add and position fields that are specific to your group.
• Unhide the Roles built-in field, see the next section for more on this.
• Omit some built-in fields from your form.
• Write Help for your fields, or tweak the Help for built-in fields.

You use Customize Registration Form to make these changes. However if you are planning on doing an Import that includes your group-specific fields, you can save a little work by doing the Import 1st — because it will do the Adds for you.

Using the Roles field

Roles enable you to selectively deal with people in your database. For example, you might want to send an announcement to just the people with some role. Additionally there are some PRESTO features that rely on roles. Either way, it would be a good idea to decide what roles you want to use before you populate your people database.

Note: the Roles field is turned off in new groups. If you plan to use roles, you must go to the Customize Registration page and do an Add Field command with Field Name set to "roles".

Pre-defined Roles

These are: inactive, guest, and sponsor. The inactive role causes a login attempt to fail with a "Logins-not-allowed" message.

The guest role must be a person's only role. The sponsor role must be a person's first role. (Otherwise they are treated as normal roles and have no special meaning). The signup of such a person is highlighted with a bluish color in the admin UI.

The guest role means the person is a "limited member". The side-effects of this are:

• The email address and phone number of a guest is never shown on a self-signup page.
• A login by a guest will fail with a "Logins-not-allowed" message.

The sponsor role allows one to do "anonymous signups" on behalf of others. That is, a sponsor can be signed up for overlapping schedule items or multiple times for the same item. A sponsor signup can later be given to another person, by displaying the spot's signup form and filling in the Give Spot to field.

A member with this role might be a pseudo-person (like the WeHelp organization) or a real person. Either way, you are trusting the sponsor to really "deliver" the number of people she signed up. (So it is okay for a real-person sponsor to "keep" 1 signup for herself).

When a sponsor uses the self-signup UI, the signup button never goes away and her signups are shown below it. Conversely if you do not want sponsor self-signups (or give-to's), simply leave the email address blank in the sponsor's registration form.

Examples of sponsor usage:

• The WeHelp organization promises to supply 8 volunteers to answer phones at some fundraiser, but who they are is not yet known OR not ever known. The latter case is always okay but is particularly for when the actual volunteers are not members of your group.
• You have people who are uncomfortable using web apps. You could make a trusted person responsible for signing them up by giving that person the Sponsor role.
• The BallBusters league at a tennis club needs to reserve 6 courts each week, but is not in a position to use Import Signups to identify who is playing on each court each week. So instead 6 anonymous signups will be placed in a rolling template.

Orienting New People

Just as you told all your current people how to access your group when it got started (see below), you probably want to give each future registrant the same sort of info.

You can automate this if desired:

• Create email messages in the Drafts folder named: New [category]. (Normally you would enter no recipients. But if there are people you always want to "CC" when someone is registered, you may enter them).
• Then when some category of person registers, she will automatically be sent the associated message.
• The message is also sent when you use Update to give an email-less registered person an email address.

There are 3 cases for category:

• The message named New [] is sent to people who have no roles in their registration info.
• The message named New [1st role] is sent to people whose first role is that (e.g. New [Guest] is sent to new guests).
• If no role-specific message exists for the new person, the system sends New [*] if it exists.

Conditional Activities

A conditional activity will be included on a person's self-signup page only if the person's registration info contains a role with the same spelling as that activity's Base Name. For details, click here.

Announcing your PRESTO website and/or an Event

It is important to recognize that you are providing a new user interface for your people. It may be a simple interface, but you still need to get them started. Also it is a good idea to test out your instructions on a small group of people before you make a general announcement. Last but not least, you might find that saving drafts of your announcements will save you time in the long run.

Note that your needs will probably change over time. For your first event, your message might contain both website and event instructions. Then depending on how far apart in time your events are, your later event announcements might omit more or less detail.

The sections below discuss generally the things you must cover. You of course may need to include instructions that are specific to your group. The annotated example below will hopefully give you a sense of the extra things you might want to include.

Finally after your group is up and running, occasionally a new person will register. So you ought to send her an analogous message to what is described below. See here for how to automate doing this.

Announcing a Website whose People Database is Already Populated

To do this:

• Go to the Email Announcement page.
• Decide who the announcement is from and who should handle replies.
  Large groups tend to prefer using email addresses of the group rather than personal email addresses.
• You will probably want to set your TO-list to Everyone in Database using the rightmost dropdown menu.
• Include the address of your PRESTO website in the message, as described here.
• Include Login instructions in the message:
  • For password policy of None, include: "if you need to login, click on the Login button".
  • For the other policies, include: "if you need to login, enter !p.password! and click on the Login button". You can type the !p.password! yourself, or use the Insert-recipient's dropdown menu and select Password. As shown below, this is automatically personalized per recipient.

Example Login instructions, and personalization for user whose Basic/Auto password=3579:

Announcing a Website While Relying on Self-Registration

This approach is mostly of interest to groups that are not in a position to pre-register their current contact list using Import People.

Via whatever mediums you wish to use (e.g. your regular email client), send a message to your current contact list that includes at least the following:

• The address of your PRESTO website (as described here).
• Something like:
  "If you have not yet registered, click on the Register link at the top of the page and then fill in the form and click on the Register button. If you have already registered, click on the Login link and enter the email and password you registered."
• You might want to mention that instructions are available beneath the registration form — particularly if you have a tall form.

Announcing an Event

Click on Email Announcement and follow the instructions above for setting the From, Reply-to, and To fields.

If you are allowing self-signups:

• If this is not part of a website announcement, you might want to start with some how-to-login instructions — see above.
• Include something that equates to: "To signup to do something, click on a schedule in the Schedules column of the What's Going On table. Then click on the button of the desired activity".

  (Note: your actual instruction could be quite a bit different. For example, if you have just 1 event going on and it has just 1 schedule named Volunteer Signup and it uses a List layout, your actual instruction might be:
  "To choose what you want to volunteer for, click on Volunteer Signup and then on the Signup for This button of the desired job and time slot".)

• Tell people how to fill out the signup form displayed when a Signup button is clicked. If you have not created a signup form of your own, this is simply "click on OK and you're done".
• If you have setup activity descriptions, signup-form help, or event-specific self-signup instructions, you might want to mention that they can click on these help links while doing a self-signup.

If you are only doing admin-signups or allowing that as well, you will need to:

• Tell people how to contact you.
• Include a list of the things they can signup for.
• Tell people the info they need to supply so that you can do a signup on their behalf.

Either way, if you have setup automatic confirmation messages, you might want to mention that.

Annotated Example (of announcing your website and telling already-registered people how to do signups)

(As noted in the message, some of the bullets below may not apply to your group. Similarly you may want to provide fewer or more how-to details than are shown here).

Event Design

[Always under construction -- more ideas appreciated]

Planning Exercises

The classic event involves people being someplace for some number of days. Accordingly the schedules for such events contain on-site activities.

Sometimes though, you are actually doing a planning exercise. For example, you want people to fill out a questionnaire, and you want this info by some date. In this case, you should create planning activities whose type is Questionnaire, rather than on-site activities.

Questionnaire Style

You can create empty questionnaires and use the signing-up or not as the answer to a question. However it is more flexible to have a questionnaire activity whose signup form has multiple questions. For example, suppose you are asking Election Officers about re-appointment and whether they can work at the November election. A form with these 3 fields is one way of doing it:

An Event is more than a Schedule

Designing your web pages is only part of the job. You also need to consider the overall flow of things. In particular, different kinds of events have different communication needs. For example, for a book sale, a please-sign-up announcement and a signup-reminder announcement might meet your needs. But for a party, you might want to send out a Who's Coming announcement to everyone before the party.