Send Scheduled Event Emails to contacts who have not yet registered for an event

[edewsberry]

I am trying to figure out how to send pre-scheduled invitations, notices, and reminders for people who have not yet registered for event.

It is clearly easy to do through Scheduled Reminders once someone is registered in some way for an event; and I thought about adding my invite list with a participant status of "Pending" or some such thing.

The problem is that then when they go to Register for the event, it doesn't UPDATE their "Pending" status - it adds a SECOND reservation.

So, I need to be able either to:

1. Ensure that a registration will UPDATE an existing registration, rather than adding an additional instance

OR

2.  Send Scheduled Reminders to a Group (preferably a Smart Group!) of people who are not yet registered for the event in any way (but allowing me to still use all the specific event tokens in the email).

I am doing this at the moment primarily as a way to automate reminders to our Board of Directors to RSVP for upcoming meetings.  Since Civi is designed for not-for-profit organizations, I would think this kind of Board of Directors management would be something that would be widely appreciated?

Thanks!

Elise

[CiviTeacher.com]

Pending status is not a recommended approach for tracking event invitations.  CiviCRM takes the term "participant" very literally by assuming an event participant has actually participated in the event.    An invitee has not participated.   I don't recommend people associating contacts with an event at all if they have simply been invited.  Event invitations are best expressed as activities of some sort (of which bulk emails are one activity).

General tip: Rather than bend Civi to your imagination, bend your methods to match Civi's assumptions, or you will have an expensive experience with CiviCRM.

Schedule reminders do not send to Smart Groups (yet).  Unless you plan on scheduling several reminders, you can do this rather quickly and easily by simply.  Then schedule one or more CiviMails.  It should take you about 15 minutes.

1. add all contacts to a group
2. subtract all contacts who have registered to the event from that same group

This can be done via static groups or Smart Groups using the Include/Exclude search in the Custom Search menu

[edewsberry]

Thanks ... but if I use CiviMail for the reminders, I don't have access to the Event Tokens ... so I would have to manually type in the info for the event every time I do a different event, wouldn't I?

I was hoping to be able to automate it for many events by using a template that uses Event tokens.

Elise