A big part of holding an event is the preparation.
- Pick a venue
- Choose a theme
- Decide on the audience
- Invite people
The last one can fairly easily be handled in Salesforce, but is not part of Summit Events. SEA touches on the invitation step by providing a link to register - just the HTML code to embed in your invitation or website.
Inviting people can be targeted (i.e. a list of specific people to invite) or broadcast. The former needs manual work to compile a list (and find their email addresses, social media accounts or snail mail address), but the latter can be a website page or social media post (or even a printed flyer).
SEA provides a simple tool for the broadcast invitation, but not the targeted one.
My proposal is to provide a way for the admin to gather a list of Lead and/or Contact records for the invitation, and track their responses on the Summit Event Instance record page. This seems like a good fit for Campaigns & Campaign Members, but there's no integration between Campaigns and SEA.
Campaigns can deal with sending emails to a large group.
Things that would make this work:
- Flag a campaign as a Summit Event
- Tie the campaign to a specific Summit Event Instance
- When a Campaign Member is added to such an event, create a Summit Event Registration record with status = Invited
- Use Email Templates with merge fields to craft the invitation - this only works if the Campaign object has fields that are populated from the related Summit Event Instance because Salesforce won't do cross-object merge fields in Email Templates. This would require custom fields (formulas?) on Campaign that bring in data from the related Event Instance.
- Merge fields include the registration link
- Ideally, each Campaign Member has a unique registration link so you can easily tie the registration back to the Summit Event Registration (already created)
- Add to all this the concept of "decline". I want to know who has received the invitation but can't attend and wants me to know that. To support this concept, there could be:
- The Registration page could have a Decline option
- Or, a new Decline page could be used that just identifies the invitee and asks them to confirm that they want to decline (and gove a reason why). This would require a new page, and a link to it in the invitation email.
I hope this gives you some ideas on how we can improve SEA to cover this important process.
That's a good approach. Campaigns are better for email sending & tracking than other objects.
