RSVP-style Event Registration

When you organise an event, you are likely to promote it to some of your existing contacts. Offering them to register via the standard online registration has several problems:

• Some will spell their names (or other information in the profile you use for the registration) differently than what is on your CRM, or with a different email. So you end up with duplicates.
• They have to retype the information that is already in your CRM (their name, email...)
• They can't excuse themselves (register with a status "can't come")

They are two options: prefilled registrations, and pre-registering the participants with a status "invited"

Pre-filled registration

This is already the case when you go to the registration form as a logged in user, but often they aren't logged in.

However, you can send in your email a link with a registration form with a checksum tocken, that will let the user to register himself.

http://example.org/civicrm/event/register?id=xxx&reset=1&cid=\{\contact.contact_id}

http://example.org/civicrm/event/info?id=xxx&reset=1&cid=\{contact.contact_id}&{\contact.checksum}

If the contact_id matches the checksum, it displays a pref-filled form. Changes:

1) Adding a message a the top "Hello, Xavier DUTOIT.(Not Xavier?)" the link goes to an empty form http://example.org/civicrm/event/register?id=xxx&reset=1&
2) Adding a link below that message "I want to excuse myself, I won't be able to attend" (that will register the participant with the status "No"

Moreover, I want to be able to spot on the participant list who is new and who has registered using the link they received. I suggest to use the (never displayed) source to add "prefilled", and use it as the class of the row, so it can be styled differently.

Pre-registration

Basic steps are:

• A group of contacts is "invited" to the event - and sent to an event page.
• The event "registration" page asks them "Are you coming?" and gives them choices, typically: Yes, No, Maybe
• The organization holding the event typically sends one or more follow-ups to:
  • folks in the invite group who have not yet responded one way or the other
  • folks who've said 'Maybe'

In version 2.2, we expect that this flow can be supported WITH some configuration work and customizations.

• Modify the Participant status label from "Registered" to "Yes" and add new statuses for "Maybe" and "No". Set visibility for all 3 to Public.
• Include a profile with the "Participant Status" field in your event registration page (you can re-label the field from 'Participant Status' to 'Are you coming?' or something like that).
• Custom versions of the registration "Thank-you page" template and the email confirmation template are needed to provide alternate language for the Maybe and No (not coming) cases. I've included a rough draft of changes needed for the thank-you page below.

Finally, in order to do the follow-up emails for the "not-yet-responders" - a Custom Search is needed which can return contact in the "Invite Group" who do not have any participant record for a particular event. Building Custom Searches.