CiviEvent Reminder Emails

[notyal]

We would love to add a feature to events that would automatically send a reminder email to all registrants a few days before each event and a thank you for attending email after the event. I believe this is a feature that would benefit many users. We do have some money allocated for this. Please let me know if this is something that anyone is interested in working on and what the next steps would be. Thank you.

[Donald Lobo]

wondering if we can use and extend the rules integration / rules scheduler (only for drupal) in this case?

can you ping us on IRC and / or email (lobo at civicrm dot org) and we can get more details and figure out what is possible etc

thanx

lobo

[jalama]

Seems to me that it would be good to have but constructing the e-mail may likely depend on also having Drupal token integration in order to be able to construct the e-mail.  Token integration is not all that difficult for Drupal objects, it will be a little more complicted for CiviCRM but I don't think beyond reason

ie you will want "Dear {first.name} {last.name}" etc...

[jalama]

IRC between Lobo and I

jalama: dlobo my initial thought is you will also have to incorporate Drupal token integration
[11:01am] jalama: but if you can deal with that it would be a good thing
[11:01am] jalama: disclaimer I have little Rule scheduler experience
[11:02am] dlobo: jalama: for rules integration, we use civicrm mailer to send stuff
[11:02am] dlobo: so u can use civicrm tokens
[11:02am] jalama: oh right
[11:02am] dlobo: thats the way we did civimail + rules, seemed a lot easier that way
[11:02am] jalama: so they would set up a civimail for the people who registered then those who attanede
[11:03am] jalama: I see
[11:03am] dlobo: hmm
[11:03am] dlobo: dont think so
[11:03am] dlobo: ideally u'll do something like:
[11:04am] dlobo: 7 days before event, send mail to all registrants who ahve status: XXX/YYY/ZZZ
[11:04am] jalama: but the mail would have to be built in Civi right
[11:04am] dlobo: (and i think thats where rules scheduler comes in)
[11:04am] dlobo: jalama: the mail contents are just  text box in the rules form
[11:05am] jalama: dlobo I''m more worried about the list of recipients
[11:05am] dlobo: the action which is done by civi-code would then use our mail infrastructure
[11:05am] jalama: how do we pass that to CiviMail?
[11:05am] dlobo: the registrants can be a smart group (for ultimate flexibility)
[11:05am] jalama: or the one off mail function
[11:05am] dlobo: jalama: its one off mail
[11:05am] jalama: maybe that's the answer
[11:05am] dlobo: not civimail
[11:05am] jalama: right
[11:06am] dlobo: but u r right
[11:06am] dlobo: if u have 100+ registrants
[11:06am] dlobo: we should think more along civimail
[11:06am] dlobo: since 1 off will never scale
[11:06am] jalama: we would need to be able to define a smart group from rules and pass that as a parameter/arg to CiviMail
[11:08am] jalama: or maybe we could have some sort of default token for event.xxx.registrants
[11:08am] jalama: that is passed as a group to civiMail

[notyal]

First, i should have mentioned that it is for a Joomla installation. My first thought was to manually set up a smart group for each event then try to handle sending the mail with a cron, but my experience with this is limited. Also there are several training managers who set up events, so the process needs to be pretty straight forward.

[Donald Lobo]

hmm, we were hoping to push most workflow related stuff on rules / rules scheduler for now, but guess it would be good to start thinking of integrating workflow stuff in Civi sooner rather than later and this might be a good project to kick it off

lobo

[Donald Lobo]

blogged on this to see how much interest there might be for a 4.1 MIH. Details here:

http://civicrm.org/blogs/lobo/civimail-integration-civievent-potential-mih-project-41

lobo