Manage an event

Running an event once it is listed: participants, the door, and what you learn afterwards.

Managing applications and participants

Once people start signing up, this is where you work. There are two stages, and the second one is the one organizers most often forget exists.

Stage one: deciding

Applications arrive with a status of pending. You can approve, reject, or waitlist each one.

The applications table for an event, with each applicant's status and, on the pending rows, the approve, waitlist and reject actions

Waitlisting is worth using properly rather than as a soft rejection. If people drop out — and they do — a waitlist is what lets you fill the places without starting again.

Stage two: getting people to confirm

Approving somebody does not mean they are coming. Approved people are asked to confirm, and until they do, their place is not settled.

You will see participants as awaiting confirmation, confirmed, needs more time, declined, or no response.

Watch the no-response group. These are people you accepted who never answered. If your event is full and has a waitlist, they are the places you can recover — but only if you look. Nothing happens automatically.

Give people a real deadline to confirm by, and tell them what happens if they miss it.

Messaging people

You can send a message to:

The first three are the ones you will use for running the event — a change of room, what to bring, a reminder the day before.

Messaging your organization's followers is limited, deliberately. You can do it once a day per event, and there is a cap on how many times in total for a given event, depending on your plan. It is meant for announcing an event to people who asked to hear from you, not as a channel to use repeatedly. See Plans and limits.

Two cases where messaging is unavailable: while an event is still under review, and after an event has been cancelled.

How many people you can take

Each event has a cap on participants, set by your plan. See Plans and limits.

Cancelling

If you have to cancel, do it through the event rather than deleting it or leaving it up. Cancelling notifies the people who registered and lets you tell them why. The event stays visible, marked cancelled, so anyone who signed up finds out what happened.

Check-in day

Check-in records who actually turned up. It gives you a real attendance list, and it is what lets the people at your event see each other on Involvo.

The QR code

Involvo generates a QR code for your event that attendees scan to check in. There is a separate one for checking out, where you are recording that too.

The organizer's attendance QR display, set to check-in for one time slot, with how long the code stays valid and when it expires

Display it where people arrive — printed at the desk, or on a screen. For an event running over several sessions or days, each part has its own code, so you check people in per session rather than once for everything.

Checking people in yourself

Your team can check somebody in directly, without them scanning anything.

Use this freely. Phones fail, cameras refuse to focus, and people arrive with no signal. Debugging someone's phone at the door while a queue builds behind them helps nobody — check them in and move on.

This also covers walk-ins: someone who turns up without having registered can be checked in on the spot, if you are accepting them.

Location checks

Where attendees check themselves in from the event page rather than by scanning, their location is used to confirm they are actually there. Scans at your own QR code and check-ins your team performs do not involve this.

Attendance that could not be confirmed is flagged rather than silently accepted, and it can be set aside if it is wrong. If someone tells you their attendance is not showing and they really were there, you can correct it.

Practical advice for the day

Afterwards

Your attendance list is what feedback and analytics are built on — see Feedback, analytics and tracking links.

Feedback, analytics and tracking links

After the event, three things tell you how it went and where the people came from.

Feedback

Participants can leave a rating and a comment on an event they took part in, once each.

You can read it in the app and export it as a file.

Feedback is not anonymous, and the export makes that concrete: it includes each person's name and email address alongside what they wrote. Participants are told this, so nobody is caught out — but it puts a responsibility on you. Treat the export as what it is, a file of named personal data: keep it where it needs to be, do not circulate it further than the people running the event, and do not use it to single anybody out for what they said.

Some organizers also link a longer feedback form of their own for anyone willing to say more.

Analytics

Attendance tells you how many of the people who registered actually came. That gap is usually the most useful number you have: it is what you plan catering, seating and materials against next time, and it is nearly always larger than people expect.

Depending on your plan you also get more detailed analytics and the ability to export data — see Plans and limits.

This answers a question most organizers guess at: which channel is actually bringing people, as opposed to which one feels busiest. A channel with fewer clicks but a much higher conversion rate is usually worth more than a large one that sends people who never register.

There is a limit on how many tracking links you can create per event, depending on your plan.

What to do with all of it

The point of measuring is the next event. Attendance against registrations tells you how many to expect; the tracking links tell you where to announce it; the feedback tells you what to change.