Spec for members area events management
Requirements
There is often a need to manage events in a way that allows members to volunteer for selection and then for a group to be selected from the volunteers and the results of selection published. As is often the case a selected member then needs to unsubscribe from the selection, thus opening a space for others to be selected from the volunteers list. When this is done by paper/pen and phone calls, it can get quite messy and stressful. A tool that allows members to subscribe and unsubscribe from the volunteers and selected list, which posts any changes to an organiser would be very useful for events such as....
Coach trips and other outings
regular group fixtures
etc
Voice has the concept of a members list
what is needed is...
The ability to advertise events/fixtures to members
The ability for members to subscribe to events/fixtures
The ability to define events organisers
The ability to notify an organiser of any changes made by event subscribers
Questions
Does the functionality described above already exist
Could it be easily be developed as an application
Would this functionality be useful to all Voice admins / groups
Wider usage
It may be useful to be able to make this facility open to the public for some events, if an event is part of membership recruitment drive.
Regards
Bryn
Interesting idea Bryn,
At the moment, no, there's no good way to achieve this directly on Voice. The closes you could probably do is a Survey for the event, which you email your members about and ask them to respond to in order to 'subscribe' to the event.
I would suggest that if we were to add it, then putting it into the existing Events Calendar would probably be most appropriate.
This already lets you create and manage events, but doesn't have any facility for a user to join that event.
So to map this to your idea, initially the event organiser would be the person creating the calendar event. Perhaps with a facility to assign the organiser role to someone else.
You could choose whether to add a Join button to the event. If you added one, the system would keep track of who had chosen to join - and give people the option to Leave if they wish to!
The event organiser would be able to see who has joined, and would also get a notification of new joiners.
I'm not sure it would be appropriate to allow user to join the event without logging in to Voice. I guess it might be OK as long as people left contact details but it would be open to abuse. Might be better to only allow registered users to join an event?
Perhaps it it's a recurring event there could be the option to Join All Recurrences.
And I expect it'd be useful if the organiser had an option to Email All Participants or something.
As a future thing it may be appropriate to also add payment for users to join events??
Does this sound useful to other Voice site users out there?
Thanks
Joe
Hi Joe,
I think that there are enough tools already out there that cover this space very well.
Thanks
Nick
Hi Nick
Your reply seems to indicate that you know enough about the system to know how this would be done. It is all very well saying to Joe all is fine but what would be more useful is if you could explain how to solve the problem enquired about and educate others less knowledgeable about the system.
Your comment seems to indicate that there is an example somewhere of such a solution. Maybe you or Joe could indicate where we can see this in action.
Something that may be useful would be if Joe or others like yourself could pick a site each month that shows off a good use of tools provided, This would provide a good level of education for users and publicise good sites being provided by Voice.
I hope you can help.
Regards
Bryn
Nick is referring to third party tools - since what you describe certainly isn't possible directly within Voice - although unfortunately I don't know what tools people use to do event management.
If anyone has any experience of using other systems for their events, and adding them to a Voice site, it would be interesting to hear about it!
I know that Superhighways use AideCRM for event management, and you can see that they've embedded an events view on their training page, but I believe this is a paid-for system.
You can also embed Eventbrite onto a website, though I have no idea if this is a good idea as I've never used it! :-)
Generally speaking, if a service offers some sort of embed code then it can be added to a Voice site - e.g., using the Raw HTML includelet. I'm happy to give advice on this if anyone is using a service that they want to embed.
Also some systems might provide an RSS Feed of events - which could then be added to a Voice site using the Feeds app (to subscribe to that feed) and RSS Feed includelet (to display the contents of the feed on your site). Again, happy to help anyone with this if they're using a third party event organising system and want to try to show it on their site!
Thanks
Joe
Thanks for your response Joe.
I think limiting the facility to logged on users would be fine as it would effectively be a members area facility. Outsiders could be catered for as members guests.
I think a lot of not for profit organisations organise events that require people to express an interest but are limited in numbers that can be catered for, so a selection has to be made as to who can go.
This coupled with people who change their mind about attending can be a nightmare for organisers, so a simple mechanism that allows people to subscribe or unsubscribe from an interested or selected list and keeps an organiser notified would be good for many organisations who try to organise regular events for members
As you say, an option for costs to be included would be useful.
Regards
Bryn