Registering teams

[eggtart]

We are organizing a walkathon and would need to register people in teams of four.  We would like to keep the profile details of each team member (so that we can contact them individually) and give each team its own campaign page.  Can this be done using CiviEvent?  Thanks in advance.

Richard

[Michał Mach]

Hey,

No direct way to register teams is available.

However, you might want to experiment with using registration profile with custom field for team name and either allow every registering person to put in their team name themselves, or use multiple participant registration functionality and require that whole team is registered by one user.

Personal Campaign Pages creation will have to be handled manually in vanilla install, unless of course you want/have proper knowledge to automate it (and contribute your customisation to the community!). :-)

Thx,
m

[eggtart]

Thanks a lot for the super fast response.  Will take a look and see if this can be handled using the custom data field.

Richard

[jasonruyle]

Eggtart,

I'm working on the exact same issue for a walkathon.
Feel free to IM me and maybe we can work through this problem together.

I have no solution either.

Jason

[eggtart]

Hi Jason,

I have tried creating a custom field (say Team Name) and put it in the profile such that when people register, they can enter the name of the team.  But that's about it.  The concept of "a team" still does not exist within civicrm.  So I cannot easily find out how many teams have registered, who the members are, how much have they raised etc.  And I think the process may be a bit too complicated for the participants.

I am looking at the household entity.  It seems to have all the characteristics that I am looking for.  You can define a household (a.k.a team) and then specify who the members are.

P.S. I am working on 2 fundraising events with similar requirements on team registration.  Mmmm..... 

Richard 

[petednz]

Have you considered using "Organisation' as the Contact Type for your Team, then using a Relationship?

[eggtart]

I would guess that Household and Organization are very similar.

The trick is how we can
a) allow the person registering to select whether this is an individual registration or team registration
b) and if the latter, we need to create an Organization (or Household) instead of an individual contact
c) and somehow, he would need to enter the info of the other team members

P.S. In the walkathon, people can participate as individuals or teams of 4

[Donald Lobo]

steps b and c will require a fair amount of code changes and enhancements. If you are interested in doing so, please contact us on IRC

lobo

[eggtart]

Hi Lobo,

We will definitely give it some serious thoughts.  But first and foremost, we need to find a quick fix for these 2 events (as registration will start in 3 weeks' time).

Richard

[Dave Greenberg]

Richard - sorry if I missed some discussion as to why this won't work for you BUT...seems like you could:

* Enable "Register Multiple Participants" for your event. This allows someone to register 1 to X folks at the same time and enter profile info for each participant.

* Manually create the team by linking each set of registrants to a new "organization" - or just assigning a custom field value with a team name to each of the four people.

* Invite the primary registrant (via email and / or a link added to the event registration Thank-you page via the configurable footer) to create a personal campaign page for their team.

[eggtart]

Hi Dave,

We sure will look into that.

A few questions come immediately to mind.  Let's say the Team registration fee is $100.  If I am the team leader and register for all the members of the team, I will pay for the $100.  But what fee option should be chosen for the other team members?  Would they be considered as "not yet paid" by the system?

And yes, I can create a custom field to store the team name.  But this "team" does not actually exist as an entity within civicrm, right?  That means when I look at the participant list, I will only see the individual participants and not any teams.  And people cannot donate to this "team".  Or am I missing something here?

Richard

[Dave Greenberg]

A few questions come immediately to mind.  Let's say the Team registration fee is $100.  If I am the team leader and register for all the members of the team, I will pay for the $100.  But what fee option should be chosen for the other team members?  Would they be considered as "not yet paid" by the system?

This question makes me wonder whether you should use a Online Contribution page rather than an Event Registration page for the team registration. Using this approach with the "Contribute on behalf of an organization" feature enabled - a team leader could "register" by making the $100 contribution and put a team name as the org name. This way the team leader will have a relationship (Employee of - so not perfect but ok) with their team. The team leader would also be the one who creates the Personal Campaign Page for that team (since this must be done by an individual) - and they would be assigned soft credits for contributions that come in for their page.

The main drawback of this approach is that the other team members are not contacts in the DB (unless you collect info in some custom fields and then manually create those contact records). However, the flow for the team leader and / or individual walker is pretty smooth. And the team leader can certainly highlight all the team members in their description on the teams campaign page.

Otherwise, if you go with Events - the only approach for dealing with the fee issue is to have 3 fee levels:
- Team Leader Registration - $100
- Additional Team members - $0
- Individual Registration - $XX  (whatever that is)

... and instruct team leader to select $0 for the additional team members.

And yes, I can create a custom field to store the team name.  But this "team" does not actually exist as an entity within civicrm, right?  That means when I look at the participant list, I will only see the individual participants and not any teams.  And people cannot donate to this "team".  Or am I missing something here?

If the team name is a custom field extending the Participant record - then you can search for registrations by team name. However, I think the flow for multiple registrations might not work to well since you can't have different profile fields for the team leader and the additional team members.

As far as "people cannot donate to teams" - currently on an individual can "own" a personal campaign page. However they can reference their team name in all the titles, descriptions etc. on that page - so it will "appear" as if it belongs to a team. As noted above - the soft credits for donations via campaign pages will aggregate for the team leader.

[eggtart]

Interesting, never thought of just using the contribution page.  That will give us something to work on over the Easter holidays.

And, Happy Easter everyone