Setting Up an Offline Event

Follow our guide to walk you through setting up an offline event on your platform. 

What is it?

Offline events are events you create as an administrator to sell tickets, RSVP, or register for.

What can I do with it?

You can set up offline events a gala night, ball, trivia event, and more. Anything that relates to a physical event you would like supporters to register for, without needing to have a fundraising page. If you would like your supporters to have fundraising pages to collect donations, these are managed through Online Events, and you can read about setting up an online event here).

Key terms:

Offline event: An in-person event that individuals or a group of people can sign up or purchase tickets for

You can start by Downloading the Event Set-up Checklist here.

Setting up your first offline event

Head to the EVENTS module, the default view here is Online Events. In your middle navigation under Offline Events, select "Create New." Clicking this will open a lightbox window and take you through a simple event wizard, which will ask a number of questions and set you up with a default offline event.

General Setup

After stepping through the wizard, your default offline event will be set up as Draft. You will be on the General Setup tab of your event, and here you can edit the event URL, add a code for unique reporting, apply a category, and much more... If you’d like your event landing page to display the location and start/end time for your event, be sure to specify these details under the Event Date and Location and Event Start Time sections located further down the page.

Entries & Fees

Clicking on the Entries & Fees tab will take you to where you can open or close entries, set a date/time for entries to automatically close and specify the closed message that will appear when your event is closed.

Types of Events

From the Entry Type section, choose the type of entry you would like your supporters to go through for this event, Options include Ticketed, RSVP Only and Registration.

RSVP Only: This will allow supporters to simply complete the form without having to make a transaction.

Ticketed: This allows you to enable tables and have supporters purchase individual tickets or whole tables. You’re able to set the price of single tickets and whole tables. Set the number of tickets available along with the maximum and minimum buy limit for individual ticket purchases. For tables you can specify the number of tables available to purchase too.

Registration: This allows a user to fill out a basic entry form where the event may have an entry fee.

Event Type Ticketed

When setting up an offline event, if you chose the ticketed event entry type, you will need to set up one or more ticket packages to go along with the event. You do this by going to Tickets area in the white middle navigation area > Click the blue "Add Package" button on the right side. Then fill out all the necessary information regarding your offline events, such as limits for ticket quantity and limits per person, etc. Once all information is correctly filled out, make sure to mark the ticketed package as open so that the tickets will appear selectable in the ticket selection.

By choosing the Registration Entry Type, you will be able to enter the set registration fee amount.

Registration Code

The Requires Code option allows you to generate a unique code that requires users to enter prior to beginning their registration. You can leave this blank to auto-generate or you can add your own unique code. This is handy if you’re ever running a corporate event where you don’t want members of the general public to join and instead only staff of a particular company. For example, you could enter a unique code Macquarie-Easter if you’re running an Easter event for the staff of Macquarie Group. Users will need to enter this code before they can proceed with their registration or purchase of tickets.

You can also specify receipt prefixes to this specific event for your own reporting purposes. These prefixes will be applied to the relevant transactions and can be searched on from within your Stripe payment gateway too.

If you have applied an entry limit, you can also enter an Event Closed Message. This will be displayed on the first page of the registration flow if the limit has been reached.

Event Pages

An Offline Event can have as many pages as you wish. The fundraiser accesses these pages via a sub navigation that appears on the event Homepage. In this example, we have disabled any additional pages so no sub navigation is appearing below the event page header. This is the default layout of an Offline Event.

An Offline Event landing page has a background image, foreground image, and right-hand panel that displays the date, location, and pricing options you have entered in the setup.

Building up your event page content is exactly the same as you would normally do within the Pages module. All content is built up using rows where you can specify the elements to use in each row and style it according to your brand and the best layout aimed to convert people to register for your online event.

Signup Form

Here’s where you can turn on and off fields to appear during the signup flow for your event such as phone, gender, organisation, mobile, address fields, DOB, and emergency contact information.

The Payment Form allows you to show or hide the Optional Donation step of the signup. We’d recommend leaving this enabled as it’s a great opportunity to solicit donations as part of the event signup by your supporters.  And finally, you can enter a Waiver to appear during the specific event signup too if you need to.

Confirmation

This is where you’ll add the copy you wish to be displayed on the confirmation page after a supporter signs up for your offline event. Alternatively, you can choose to redirect users to a specific page you have set up in the Pages module if you prefer.

The Confirmation section also allows you to send a confirmation email to supporters after they complete the signup. You can choose the design email templates you have already set up on the Platform Level (you may even wish to create a unique email template just for this event to carry through the event look and feel), enter the Subject line and then the body copy, as needed. Remember to use the Personalisation Tags to personalise your email copy for a more polished look.

Tables

If you chose the Ticketed entry type and enabled tables, this is where you can manage table hosts and guests of each table. For example if one of your hosts calls to advise that their guest can’t make it after all – they could either update these defaults from their login area or this is where you could do this for them. Click into the specific table and then edit the hosts details or the guests details as needed.

Social Sharing

Here’s where you can customise the social sharing options for the specific offline event. This will override the Platform Level social sharing. Customise the copy you’d like people to share through Facebook, Twitter, and Email.  You can choose to enable or disable social sharing from appearing on the default confirmation page after supporters have completed their signup. In the earlier example of running a Macquarie event, you may not wish to add social sharing copy as the event is essentially closed to the public.

Custom Navigation

You can find the custom navigation under Advanced Options. This allows you to turn off the platform-wide primary nav and add your own offline event-level navigation. This means you can essentially create microsites within your platform. Go nuts! But please be kind to the user experience.

Custom Dollar Handles

Also under Advanced Options, you'll find Custom Dollar Handles, where you can add your own offline event-level personal donation amounts. This will override the Platform Level dollar handles.

Cloning an event

When you’ve got an event up and running and are happy with the style, rather than having to set it up all over again for your next offline event, you can simply clone the event. Head back to General Setup tab when editing your Event, and from the little More Options in the top right, choose the Clone Event option. This will take a copy of the event excluding any donations and members associated to that event.

Offline Event view for registrants

Here’s how an offline event will appear to someone who has completed the signup.

They are able to manage their event and edit the guests' names if the event is ticketed.