Hello Erin, TLDR: My response is not how to make Cvent do it automatically, although it may be possible with the API and a custom contact field for Region.
We do a similar thing with school Districts and Regions of the state.
Cvent is weak on relationships across contacts. There is not an easy way to automate it within Cvent. And I'm not sure if the fields you need are accessible using the API and a script. If so, that would be one route.
If this is an annual conference, (i.e., something you need to know only occasionally), a simple way is to handle it externally, outside of Cvent.
The factor to consider is how often do you need to run and share the report?
I assume you are collecting a County field during registration and can report on that.
Then make a table in Excel with the columns County and Region, then use merge or lookup/match to populate the Region for each person. Share the resulting Excel report with those who need to see it.
I have a script that I run to do this for me in seconds. But it is external, so if the info in Cvent changes, of course, I must export again and re-run the script. But this is for a report that I don't need to run every day, so not a big deal.
To do it internally, inside Cvent, you can make a custom contact field to store the Region. (This solution is still not automatic, but helpful because it is now being stored in Cvent.) Run the above lookup/merge Excel report to get the Region for each person, then bulk import it into your Contacts custom field. The custom contact field is usable inside an Event Report.
The downside is that you will have to update it for new Contacts (but you can easily see who is missing Region info), and you'll have to double-check it occasionally as contacts move and change Counties but the Region field will not change automatically; you'll have to make the changes either manually or bulk import.
oh! added idea: a custom contact field that you use during registration: Instead of the standard County field, let registrants choose from the drop-down of custom county field that already has the region attached to it, like "1-Brown, "2a-Kane". The registrants won't care what the number part means, they just choose the county name. This would report sorted by Region. Or if you do the County first, "Brown (1), Kane (2a), it would sort by County. You could have both ways in 2 custom fields and ask people to select it twice during registration, which may be too silly. But again, you can always manipulate the exported report outside of Cvent and slice the Region and County into 2 columns.
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Kim Scannell
Librarian
The Center: Resources for Teaching and Learning
United States
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-25-2023 13:03
From: Erin Widdicombe
Subject: Workaround for automatically assigning attendees to "groups"
TLDR: Essentially, what I am trying to do is find a way to automatically assign attendees to a specific group without their knowledge so that I can report on them easily.
During registration, we ask all of our registrants the County they are located in (it's a statewide conference). Internally we operate using "Outreach Regions" which a collection of counties that one person oversees. I want to figure out a way to assign each person to their respective Outreach Region, so that when I create a report, I can easily see how many people are registered from each region. Currently, I have to create a separate report for EACH region (filtering on the counties), which makes it difficult for people who want to see a high-level view of the regions in one place. They have to open and close 9 different region reports.
- I do not want to ask the attendee to self-identify their outreach region or require them to take any additional steps/clicks to identify their region. The regions are for internal use only.
- "Audience Segments" feature won't work, because that would require me to constantly be manually adding people as they register. I need it to be automatic.
The closest I've come so far to figuring out a solution was to create a Choice Question during registration, with each choice being a different Outreach Region. Then, I created link logic so that the only option available to the registrant would be the Outreach Region they belong to. Then, using custom CSS on the widget, I would hide the widget so that the registrant is unaware the question is even being asked or answered. The problem with this, however, is that by default it does not mark the option as checked/selected even though there is only one option available to them, so it would still require the registrant to manually click the box/radio button.
Does anyone have any other creative workarounds I can try?
#Admin/Reporting
#Registration
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Erin Widdicombe
Registration Manager
Indiana Youth InstituteUnited States
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