Events and conferences

Events with sessions, tracks and capacity, so a delegate books a place at the event and their choices within it. Capacity is held per session rather than only per event, which is what stops a popular workshop being oversold while the event as a whole still shows space. Waiting lists behave properly: somebody who could not get into a session is a record rather than an email somebody remembers.

Delegate records sit against the member where the delegate is a member, and stand alone where they are not, because non-member attendance is how a large share of recruitment happens and it should not be lost. Just as important, a delegate who is a lapsed member is recognised as one rather than appearing as a stranger, which is the difference between a follow-up that reads as a welcome back and one that reads as a cold approach.

Exhibitor and sponsor records against the event, with their packages, their entitlements and their invoicing. This is the half of a conference that usually falls outside the system and then has to be reconciled by hand, because a sponsor is a commercial relationship with deliverables attached rather than a delegate who paid more. Held here, what a sponsor is owed and what they have paid are the same conversation.

Member and non-member rates, grade-based pricing, early-bird periods, package pricing, group bookings and voucher codes. All of it is rules rather than duplicated products, so there is one place a price comes from. That matters at the moment a non-member sees what membership would have saved them, which is the most persuasive thing your pricing ever does and only works if the two numbers are both right.

Bookings taken through the website or the portal, invoiced and settled through the same finance records as membership, so event income and membership income reconcile in one place rather than two. Comp places, speaker waivers and committee attendance are recorded as what they are rather than as zero-value tickets, which is what makes the eventual answer to what an event returned defensible rather than approximate.

Attendance recorded against the delegate, feeding CPD where your scheme counts it and engagement where you measure it. The no-shows are the more interesting list and the one nobody looks at: a member who books events and stops turning up is telling you something months before their renewal date does, and that signal only exists if attendance was actually recorded rather than assumed from the booking.