CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Greetings,

I'm trying to set up CiviEvent in such a way that it will automatically send scheduled reminders to only participants who have not responded to the invite. We're in the midst of a national tour with hundreds of events and we're coming across one big issue. Here is what I'm doing:

1. create event
2. search for and select the group of individuals we want to invite, register them as "pending" or "maybe" in the event
3. send out an email inviting the group to the event, and wait for responses to be made on the public site

The Problem: When someone RSVPs on the public side of the website, civi never changes their status from pending to attending. Instead, it creates a separate entry for them so that there are two records for that attendee. One confirmed (or denied), and one pending.

I disabled "register for multiple participants from the same email address," but to not avail.

Two thoughts: if I'm doing something wrong, please let me know. If this is not a feature, we'd be happy to pay for it.

If it does what I'm hoping it does, we'll be able to do two things. 1. schedule and send reminders for only the attendees who have not responded, and 2. be able to see a list of everyone who responded and didn't respond in one export (right now it has duplicates). A true RSVP system.

Thanks for your quick replies.

Thanks Upperholme,

I doubled checked this, just to be sure, and we do have "update the matching contact" selected. Great guess though, I was hopeful it would work.

The issue here, is not that its creating duplicate entries, it's that it's marking a person as having two unique participant statuses for one event. So in their contact record it shows them participating in an event twice - once at a "pending" and once as "confirmed."

Thanks again,

Ricky

Aah, thanks for clarifying. I missed the fact that you were "pre-registering" participants.

An interesting approach, and one that I've never used before. Would it not be possible to work-around this issue by not pre-registering, and using an alternate strategy:

Create a group or a smart group for your invitees for a given event and get all the contacts for that event into that group. Promote the event to them via a bulk mailing, potentially using the checksum token so that the profile will be pre-filled when they hit the registration page. Instead of using Scheduled Reminders to chase up, you could schedule one or more follow up mailings  to a second smart group that is defined as all those in the first group, but excluding those that are registered for the event.

Would that work?