Event Properties

Describing the Event

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.

Event's Phases and Start Date

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:

1. After creating an event, you use Make Signup Schedule's bottom-of-page links, its Insert Days setup action, or its Remove Days setup action when you need to adjust how many setup, public, or takedown days it has.
2. To move an event to a different set of days, do an Update Event Properties and change its start date. This is a major change: changing an event's start date CHANGES ALL DATES ASSOCIATED WITH THE EVENT. Thus it is for postponements and the like. For example, if a snow storm postponed an event for a week, you could change the event's start date and send out an email announcement asking people to cancel their (now 1 week later) signups if they cannot do the activity one week later than originally scheduled.
3. Changing an event's start date is not the way to create a new event like the original event. For that, you should use the Copy an Event dropdown menu on the Creating an Event page.
4. Changing an event's start date is not the way to postpone just some of the activities in an event. For that, you should use Insert Days or possibly Select/Update specific schedule items — see Make Signup Schedule.

Event Staff

Staff Roles

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:

• When an announcement is sent, they can be identified in the From or Reply-To field.
• Via the Setup Auto-Messages page, you can setup to have them be automatically copied when a signup action occurs.
• You can include info about a staff member (e.g. her telephone number) in a message, via the Email form's Insert Staff Info dropdown menu.
• The coordinator's info is displayed at the top of the self-signup page (so people can contact the coordinator with questions about the event).

Setting 1st Chair Via a Signup

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

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.

Admin (and Agent) Check-ins

You can of course always set Status as desired, but the UI provides 2 levels of highlighting to facilitate doing check-ins:

1. You are shown where check-ins are applicable during the formal check-in period by the fact that such signups have a status of Open. To do a check-in, you change Status from Open to the desired status (usually Okay, occasionally Late).
2. The 2nd level is provided for unzoomed signups in the List view: the Status dropdown menu is replaced by a Check-in button. You do a check-in by clicking this button. This changes the signup's smart status to a real Okay (and restores the Status dropdown menu).
   • Even though an un-checked-in signup is nominally a No Show after the schedule item is over, the button stays until the end of the day. This is done to give you a grace period for doing check-ins that had slipped between the cracks.
   • (To set status to Late, just use the Status dropdown menu after clicking the Check-in button).

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).

Self Check-ins

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:

• Status is set to a real Okay if the action is done no later than 10 minutes after the schedule item starts.
• Status is set to a real Late if the action is done after that (and still in the check-in period).

Other Fields

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).

Events that Repeat Frequently

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:

• Always listing a few upcoming meetings on Self-Signup Home. (Note: how many to list at once is purely a matter of taste).
• Adding one more instance of the meeting whenever the current meeting is over (and thus no longer shown on Self-Signup Home).
• Dealing with all the old events that build up.

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).

Using the Create Next dialog box

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:

• Enter a number to start it that many days after the latest meeting so far (e.g. enter a 7 for weekly meetings).
• For a semi-monthly or monthly meeting, you would usually enter 14 or 28 respectively. But at the end of a "5-week month", you would enter 21 or 35.
• You can also enter a date if you prefer.

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.

• A 0 causes the reminder to be sent on your event's last day. A -1 sends it the day before that, a 1 the day after, and so on.
• By default, the subject and body of this reminder are 1-liners, and the message is sent just to you.
• If you want a customized reminder, create the desired message and name it: Create your event's name when you save it in the Drafts folder.

(Note: the default reminder is automatically sent when you create the 1st instance of a frequently repeated event).

Management of Old Events

When you click on the Create button, existing events in the series are affected as follows:

• Any past event whose stage is not Completed* has its stage set to Out of Date.
• If there are now more the 4 Out of Date events, the oldest are deleted after having their schedules and signups moved to an event name Repeating-Event's Name (HISTORY), which PRESTO creates automatically as necessary.
• This History event keeps the 3000 most recent schedule items or the 9 most recent months, whichever is less. To force the creation of a new History event (and thereby keep more history), set the History event's stage to Out-of-date when the Create Next command tells you it is full.

*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.