Name: Creating & Managing Events
Uploaded: 2025-09-03T19:00:21.556Z
Duration: 30 min 8 s
Description: Creating & Managing Events

Transcript for "Creating & Managing Events": Hello, all my Altru friends. Thank you for joining me today. Super excited to have you here. I see our numbers are rising. We're gonna stay here for just a moment while we wait for everything to get going. Hey, Casey. So, some of you have already found the chat. It's in the upper right. You can go in there, say hey, like Casey did. But our numbers are climbing, so we'll get rolling in just a second. I just wanna give it a moment. Hi, Ward. So today's session is the, under the finer points of all three thing we're doing here. We're gonna talk about creating and managing events. I'm really excited about talking about this today just because I've seen a lot of people's events in Altru, and sometimes you guys skip some of the details, and I'm gonna talk to you about how those can help you today. I'm gonna do a brief show and tell as well. But before we do that, let me say hi. How are you? My name is Evan. I'm a customer success manager at Blackbaud. I've been with the company a while. I think it's almost six years now. I live in Wyndham, Maine. I love over the outdoors, consumer of multiple pies. I'm happy to meet you all, and I'm glad to be here to help you guys learn some more about Altru. Hey, Kathy. How are you doing? It's good to see familiar names in there. I love that you guys come to see me regularly. It's always good to have a returning crew. And if you're new, good to see you guys. Glad you're joining us. Some of you have already found the chat in the upper right. If you wanna go in that chat, this is a place for us to all get together, so I would love for you to share and connect up in there. You can tell me about yourself, like, where you live, what your place of work is, what you're looking forward to about the autumn. Personally, for me, it's kind of like the switch in, like, the seasonal foods. I do love summer, but for some reason, I just think that autumn food is better. Looking forward to some pumpkin pie and some apple pie. Apple picking just started up with Maine where I'm at. I went picking apples recently and I had a great time. So you could tell me about something about yourself, maybe your favorite kind of pie, what you're looking to cook the most. But also when you're up in that chat, that's where you can talk to me. That's where you can ask me questions. And if you wanna talk to each other or ask each other questions, you can do that too. If you want to answer each other's questions, you can do that too. So jump up to that chat and say hello to me. Like Donna, who works at the Kentucky Historical Society. Hopefully, everything's going good in Kentucky today, Donna. We've been having lovely weather in Maine. I know that for some of you, you're like, oh, no. Summer's ending, but I'm already like, yay. It feels like autumn. And Melissa is down in Winston Salem. Excellent. Chocolate chess. I don't know what that is, Melissa, but it sounds delicious. Yeah. I I don't know if you guys know this, but I love pie. It's like my thing. I talk about it too much. Probably should see a therapist or something about it or maybe a baker. I don't know. But let's talk quickly about some housekeeping. This webinar has been broadcast to you, through your computer speakers. So if you can't hear me, it's probably something you need to work on. Refresh your browser. You can, chat questions to me in the chat, and, there's gonna be a survey at the end. So make sure to take that when I give it to you. So let's talk today about what we're here for, events. Right? But when you guys host an event for your patrons, this is a great opportunity for you guys to impress your public as well as drive revenue with your organization. With Blackbaud Altru, you can do many things with your events to help you put your best foot forward. And we're gonna be talking today about some of those details and how you can utilize them. Hopefully, you've already been doing this, And, hopefully, you've already been working in Altru, so this should be pretty easy. So the first thing we're gonna talk about is what kind of event you're doing. Right? There are different types of events, like scheduled programs, preregistered programs, special events. If you go up in the upper right where the chat area is, you will see an area that says docs. And in those docs, there's even something I've shared for you called what kind of event should I pick, and it kinda breaks down the difference between the different types of events that we can make and why you would do them. Events are different than general admission. It's not just the walk in, walk out of your, organization. This is for something you created, and it's something that's special. Right? Most of the time, you're gonna be making a scheduled event or a preregistered program. The main difference between those two is that one of them asks for information on the guests like their name and it's designed to track who comes. While a typical just regular scheduled program doesn't ask for that information. And a special event is a big fundraiser, something more involved, doesn't happen often. So when we're creating the event, this is our creating our events screen right there. We start we have a lot of fields, and you gotta make sure that you're utilizing all of these fields as best as you can. And whether or not they're gonna be useful to you is up to your organization, but they really can help you with your data. And this is all about tracking good data. The first is the category. Categories is something that you can create. There's some that are preprogrammed in there, but those help you break it down. Right? Location, obviously, tells you where you are. Price lists, you can load premade ones or you can have ones created ahead of time. Restrictions on, like, whether it's a member or not. Registration, that's that little checkbox that's oh, so important, right, whether or not it's gonna require them to give us your information or it's just general information, and the resources tab, which is too often overlooked. We're gonna go into a lot of these, so, you know, just bear with us and we'll talk some more about these going forward. And thank you to everyone else who's jumping in the chat. And let's see who's here. Oh, Miami. Make sure it's nice and warm down there in Miami. They don't get autumn in Miami really until, like, late November. And even then, come on. Okay. We're gonna talk quickly about the categories. Okay? These help you sort your events. They help identify the purpose of the event, and they make querying on them a lot easier. But more importantly, people don't realize this, the category that you assign to these actually, affects your event calendar that exists in Altru. You ever wondered why some of those things have different colors? It's the categories. Well, we got more people chiming in over there. We got Colorado, Illinois. Everyone's everywhere. I'm loving it. Hi, Tessa. Hi, Pat Patty. Thanks for joining in. So the event calendar is sorted by categories and it helps make things easier to read. If you're ever wondering how do I make a new category right in that image right there, you can actually just type in a new category and say this is the category I wanna use, and it will ask you, do I wanna make a new category? You can say yes. The categories are just a typical code table that you can go in and change if you need to. The locations, very similar. They help prevent double booking in the same spot. You can create a location and you can create how big it is. You can edit those. Those help, track the size of your event and they help plan for event needs. It also helps you looking back so you can see how events were done in the past. A lot of this stuff you guys are gonna find is actually more useful for the next person than it is for you, and you wonder why I'm talking to you about this. But please remember that you and your staff may not work forever. One of you may go buy that winning Powerball ticket for tonight, and suddenly you're a billionaire. And with all the love you have for your organization, you're out the door. So someone has to take over. When they look back on your past events that you've created, all the details you put in there are going to help. And so the location that you had this last event may helps the next person to plan this event. When you're adding restrictions, that's that restrict tickets to these memberships, you can create membership perks by doing that, and it makes events only accessible to certain members. It's a fantastic way to really create something special for your members and that you can create it by membership level. So you can create events just for membership levels. And then, of course, the resources tab. And all of this, I'm going to go over a little bit more. Feels like I'm rushing. I know. The resources tab is really important and actually, people ignore it a lot of times because it's right next to that general area. But if you have an event and you think you might do it again, tracking the event resources is a really big help. It helps track what kind of needs you have, planning ahead with your staffing, but can also be used to help plan other events in the future. And most importantly, this can be edited after the event is over. So maybe you don't know what you actually need, but you've done the event now and you can go back and say this is what we actually did and this is what we actually needed. So you go back in and you add that information in there, and the next time you run this event, you have that. Now a lot of you might be saying, well, I keep that somewhere else or I keep that in my desk or I put it on a notepad and then I lose that notepad right away. Remember, the whole point of this is to keep as much data in the same place as possible because that helps the next person. So keeping all of your data in Altru on the event record is really a great practice, and I really think you should all try to do your very best. So we're gonna talk about, adding individual events as well. So once you have finished adding all those details on that page we were just looking at, that's when we get to do the actual events for the program. That's the easy part. But once you've gotten that program created and you start making your events, you can actually add even more details to your events. Some of the more famous ones that you guys make sure you gotta do are notices and disclaimers and questions. If you add these, these help your guests be ready for your event, and it helps you prepare for their needs. These are user defined, which means that you can create as many as you want, ask as many things as you want, and prepare for as much information as you want. However, there are limitations, and you really don't want these to be very long. And you don't want people to have a lot of them. Just remember, if you only have 40 seats for this event and it takes fifteen minutes for somebody to fill out your notices and disclaimers and to answer all your questions, it is possible that while they're in the process of doing that, they will actually lose their ticket. So let's not put a whole lot of information into these, unless it's absolutely necessary. The longer it takes to fill out, the less likely that people will see it all the way through. So anyone have any questions about anything I've covered so far? I know I just went through a bunch really fast. Okay. I got a good audience, I can tell, for this. You guys are all smarter than I than I need to do here. So let's talk really quickly, and, I'm gonna do a quick demo. I'll still be able to see your questions, but I'm going to be sharing my screen and showing you Altru. I wanna let you know ahead of time the Altru, that you're gonna be seeing is a fake Altru database. There's nothing real about it. This is nobody's information. This is a Blackbaud internal, version of Altru that we use just for general testing and for demonstrations just like this. So bear with me for a moment while I switch over and share this screen. Okay. You should be seeing my Altru screen right in front of me. I'm gonna show you all how these work again, and we're gonna go right through it. So this is our scheduled program. We've just hit, under events, we just hit add new, and it shows scheduled program. I'm gonna pick a scheduled program because that's the most common one, and we'll go through it really quickly. Like we said, here's where you're gonna put in your name. Now this is simply the overarching program. Some people get confused about this. There's the events and then there's the program. They often have the same name. However, that doesn't have to be the same. So you're gonna put a description in here. And people ask me, well, what's the purpose of that description? And, again, it's for the next guy or it's for somebody else that new is new to your organization that's opening this up. And they don't know that the name of your thing means something. So they haven't, like, clicked for them. So you gotta put a description in there so it's nice and easy. We're gonna pick a cat category, and we look up and down and we say, oh, none of these categories really, like, say what I needed to say. So I'm gonna say I'm gonna add this as a new entry. And now I have a different category called fancy stuff. For this, the same can be done with a location, but let's just look at our locations real quick. If you don't know which one, you can add it right here if you haven't something in there. But make sure you do a brief search and look at it. The capacity is auto generated from the locations that you created with their thing. However, if you happen to know that this today, it actually is gonna have less or more, you can change that right there. You can also add multiple locations if it's going to go on multiple days in multiple locations. You can load your price type from your preprogrammed ones, or you can come in and just add one, or you can just type in whatever you want. And you can change these as you go. If you click on this right here, the requires registration, if you're ever confused, just look at this, and this will tell you this will tell you that it's gonna be a preregistered program. By making this a preregistered program, it is gonna let you ask them questions, like their name and all that information so that you can gather that data about the people. Otherwise, it's just sort of a general admission thing that you're asking. When we do the membership programs right here, this is allowing us to restrict it just to these members. And that means that somebody is gonna have to if they're buying it online, they will have to log in as a member and it will let them, be able to buy the tickets. Also, it means that if they're at the front desk or anywhere else, they'll have to verify that they're a member before the tickets are able to be sold to them. You can set it to all the levels with that or just a specific level of that membership program. And you can also limit it, like, if you want only to have allow them to buy three at a given time. The resources tab, which is right up here, there's two types of resources. There's supplies or equipment and there's people. Everything really falls under that. If you're looking up in this resource area right here, You can do a food package, and you can say they need 32 of those. You can do a lot of different choices in here, and it's all gonna put in there. And, again, this information is something you can go back and edit afterwards, so it gives you a chance to have some really good data on how things were used. And for staffing resources, again, you can come in here and pick people that you say, these are what I need. Maybe I need an interpreter. It's gonna be filled by a staff member. I need one of them. Oops. Sorry about that. Okay. Again, this can be edited later, but it's gonna give you some information to get you done. Can also go with that and remove it if I want. Okay. So that's the overarching program. I've done it. I've created it. Now I'm in that program. Now there's no actual events planned for this yet. This is just the name of the overarching program. So once we're here, we can actually come in and we can create some events by going to the event list. The calendar is just gonna show events for this particular program, nothing more, nothing less. We'll go through all these tabs really quickly, but first, we'll start with the event list. Notice there's nothing in here because we haven't had anything, so we'll hit add. This is where you get to look at some more information. So you can name this different than the overarching program or leave it. You can set a recurrence if you wanna do it over and over again, or you can just say this is gonna be a single date, and it's gonna be today. It's still gonna be in same location. If you're struggling with it, entering these, a little fun fact, you can just type them in military style and it figures it out for you. Again, you can do a restriction here. If you didn't do it on the overarching program, you can do it just for this one. If you wanna create a specific event under the program that's just for members in case you wanna create a separate one that is not for members or that is for nonmembers is what I'm trying to say. The other thing we can do when we're here is you can do a time pattern. You can create multiple locations, and you can add resources. These are gonna be autofilled from the program, but if you know that in this particular day, you're gonna need more than just this or less, you can come in and make those changes that'll only affect that particular event. It'll tell you right on the bottom, the events to be scheduled is one. However, if I decided that this is actually going to come back and it's gonna be every day from today until next week. You'll see that it suddenly did it for eight of them. We can also change that from every day to perhaps it's gonna be weekly. It's gonna start today. It's gonna run every Wednesday until the twenty fourth. Now it's gonna only do four of them. So it's gonna create an event. It's gonna be identical every single time on every Wednesday. It's gonna run from 02:30 to 03:30. Great question, Ward. This is being recorded, and you will all get a copy of this mailed to you after this is over. Thanks for asking. Before you leave, make sure you go to that doc section though and get in there and get some good stuff. So this is a nice easy way to create your event. So I've just created four. It's gonna roll right through it. Now I've got these four events. There are, three events rather. They're in here, and they're good to go. Now oh, it says there's a conflict. Emily, you asked how to show more than one location. It's pretty easy. Let's go in here and edit this one. If I hit programs spans multiple locations, I can just simply add in a second location right here by doing a search for it. And then it's gonna be just like that. You can also do a check for conflicts. The reason this is showing up as conflicts is because this is a test database, and somebody's probably making an event right now in it as I'm doing it. So once we've got your event done, though, here's some other things to look at. Here's your on sale area. This right here is really great information. You might have everything set up in here to work the way you want it and it might not be. Perhaps you don't want this available on the daily sales right away. You want it to be available online right away, but you don't want people that are coming in the front door to have an option until a day before the event or a month before the event or a specific date and time. Maybe you want the on sale period to end just twenty minutes after it starts. You can change all of this for each specific style of sales that it would work for. You can also set up presale tickets from here as well. You can adjust the prices from this tab right here. These are the ones that we brought in when we did it on the program level. You can create fees and taxes. That's a great question. You can schedule multiple events under a program for annual fundraising. You just make sure you wanna name the program something that's easy to remember and look at, and the events need to be have very specific naming to make sure it makes all sense. You can also do fees and taxes, like I said, discounts. Now discounts are created somewhere else, but this is all placed where you can actually make a discount that's specific to this event, and that's something that you might wanna work out if you're thinking about it. The tickets, these are just gonna do your ticket templates. We already talked about resources. That was on the other one, but I pull in just like we did over here. And the registration information is where we add questions and notices and disclaimers. Isabelle, you are just the best. Thank you for sharing that great information. She says, if you haven't looked at it, that you need to make sure if you set the presale rules after having made the events, it doesn't copy to each individual event. However, if you keep the rules first and then the event, it does copy. So in other words, if you have lots of events, you'll have to go make a lot of changes. You can do your questions and disclaimers in here. They are really important, and make sure you're getting a chance to use those. You can create them with these little, buttons right over here if you have one in here, and you can make them required. The web forms area right here is very specific to the web forms. And what this does is it just adds a description, something that is gonna show up on your web form if it's not entirely clear what this is. So this is something that you might wanna play around with, and a lot of times people will come in here and they'll add something, and then they go and they just kinda check it on their web form to go, how does that look? See if it, like, comes out nicely. But it is a very handy thing. Good question here is, do registration information items only work in preregistered programs? Do you mean, like, questionnaires and things like that? Yeah. And they they don't necessarily only work there, but they're less helpful in some something that doesn't gather any kind of information from somebody. So speaking of gathering, right, we talked about this, the point, the purpose of this. You know, gathering in people for events is just super important for your organizations. They're gonna help spread the arts in your community. I personally am a huge fan of the arts, and I wanna thank you and everybody that you work with for everything you do to bring the arts to your community. It is just so necessary in the world we live in today. And I am grateful for all the work you do, and I hope that we've been helpful with you. We have lots of resources for you guys. They're in the docs section, which is in the upper right. Said that, like, a couple times now, but I wanna make sure you grab them. Those are all the things that are in the docs, so make sure you grab them. They're useful resources. You will be sent, this anyway, so you'll have access to it, but make sure you get those. If you are interested in something called advisory plus, it's a great way to get more out of Altru, and it's basically like a way that you can hire somebody from Blackbaud to sort of be your one to one consultant on a regular basis. It's got a cost, but it's a fantastic way to to really get more out of Altru. I have some customers that use it right now and they absolutely love it. And I'm just putting a plug in there for it because it might be what you need. If that's something you wanna know more about, just go up in the chat and say, Evan, I wanna know more about that, and I'll make sure somebody reaches out to you. But it is a great, great resource that Blackbaud has been offering for the last year, and it's really been going forward very well. That is a great question. What does Altru cost? It varies, and so I can't tell you that. Plus, to be absolutely honest with you, I'm not a salesman. And, so I don't know what it costs. Somewhere between $2 and a million, it's right in between there somewhere. But it does vary, between company to company and usage. So that's all I can really say on that. But if you wanna know how much the, advisory plus costs, that also kinda varies, so I don't know. But, again, if you want somebody to reach out and talk to you about it, Natalie, just let me know and I'll have a salesperson give you some data. There's always an opportunity to engage with your peers. So if you guys ever wanna do any of this stuff, like the reference program or Blackbaud champions, reach out to us. They're a great way to spotlight your success and put yourself up as a customer story. If any of you have ever been to Blackbaud and you wonder, you know, how do we get those customers to come up and talk to us? It's because they reached out to us and they wanna talk to us about their stuff. You have lots of resources, besides just me, so make sure you're utilizing those as best as you can. I am launching a survey. I appreciate it if you would fill it out because it helps me create better materials going forward. So if you fill that survey out, I would be eternally grateful. You have a minute left too. If you wanna ask me any, like, really important questions, this is a great time to ask them too in there. But it's been great talking to you guys. You guys good questions, and I hope this has been helpful to you at least at some level. If it has if there's more you wanna know, reach out to us at Blackbaud. We're here to help, and we're trying to get you guys to be the best users of our system as possible. Thanks for listening to me talk.