Need a recommendation on WHETHER OR NOT to globally add invitees to an event?  

If so, would they be added as registrants and should I only add past atendees to the event or all that are invited?

 Your response is much appreciated.

I would globally add invitees to an event and check the box that says update number invited. Whether or not you want to just add attendees or all that were invited depends on how you want to use the information. If you'll want to do event analysis down the line then it would probably useful to add all that were invited and then mark those that turned up as attended.

Also, the use of registrants differs from one place to another. In my last job we added everyone that was invited as invited but not registered. Then if they said they would come they were marked as registered, and if they attended then they would be marked as attended.

Hope this helps a little.

Thanks
Lee

 Kate,

Many organizations do not add all invitees to an event because there is a tendency to invite a much larger number then are expected to attend and the events module does have a hard time working with events with a lot of participants. I have found that events with more then a couple hundred participants take a long time to load and crash quite often. Also, a lot of people have trouble searching and looking through participants when there is that many of them. But if you want to really see how you interact with your constituents, then having everything they were invited them to and what they attended or didn't attend on their constituent record can be really nice. And if you tend to invite a lot of people to everything who never even respond, then you can argue for cutting the list and saving postage.

The process I have used was to add everyone who was invited and be very strict about the use of "Registered" and "Do Not Register". All of the invitees are added to the event as participants and each participant who RSVP's to come is marked "Registered" and those who decline are marked "Do Not Register" (for extra-safe reporting). You can then set your filters (and have your users set them as well) to only show the registered participants and guests, and when the event is over, then you mark those who attended using the query based on Registered.

For events that have happened, it depends on your time constraint and your reporting needs. If you are on the July/June Fiscal Year, then maybe now you can say that there is one policy going forward and everything past is done as it was done (or you could clean up the last year or  so for comparative reporting).

We use the same process of "Registered" and "Do Not Register" as Nak.  Our events have less than 500 constituents so we add them all as participants to make the question of "who hasn't responded that we need to call" a little easier.  If the events were larger I would only add the attendees.

 But even with this small a group, my staff still have a difficult time of seeing who has responded and who hasn't.  We've color coded everyone in the Events module.  We opened the event, then opened the Participants tab.  I right-clicked on the screen, and chose Legend from the menu. 

From the options in the window, we colored Guests blue (and are listed first in the window), and Participants Who have Registered are red.  Vendors are black and italicized.  We left the rest alone.  Now when someone registers we mark them Registered, and they become colored automatically. 

 I use the filters quite often but my staff is more visual and find this method more helpful.

I agree with Nak's comments...if your invitation list is under 100, I'd add them. But if you're looking at larger events, I'd wait & only enter attendees. It's cumbersome, to say the least. And there is no way to globally remove invitees once they've been added; we learned this the hard way when working with a list of over 1000 invitees! It really slows down the system. You either have to remove them one by one or recreate the event & start over.

Tracy, 

My trick for having to remove a large number of the participants was to export everyone out--participants in one export & guests in a second--and then delete the event, create a new one & import everyone we wanted back in. It took a couple of rounds, but after redoing the same event 4 times, I was pretty fast at it.