Hello, and welcome to this Tip of the Week. I wanted to chat about Access Portals this time around. Access Portals are the brand-new product replacing Parked Portals and Portals. There is one free Access Portal included with your Cvent's Event Management account – I am going to share a few tricks on how to best take advantage of it.
But first, what is an Access Portal?
An Access Portal looks like a small website your stakeholders will be able to log into to access reports you gave them access to. Fresh data is pulled every time the user runs the report, so that report is dynamic and always up to date.
Features included for free:
- Secure login – Cvent account admins get to control who is added to the portal. Once invited, the user is prompted to create their own login. Credentials are thus unique and secure.
- Unlimited users – Users can be organized in groups the reports get published to, but you can also publish reports to singular users, allowing you to fine-tune your content's accessibility.
- Modern and branded design – Using the same Site Designer tool as Flex, you can build your Access Portal to match your brand identity.
- Portal Emails – Using the same Email Designer as Flex, you can personalize emails and automate notifications for when new reports are added.
Premium Features:
- Subsequent Access Portals past your first free one
- Sharing Meeting Request Forms, Event Calendars, and Appointments Calendar
Now that we have the lay of the land, here is the step by step of how my team and I structured the Access Portal for my organization:
Step 1: We branded our Access Portal and its emails with our company colors and logo, keeping it general rather than event-specific. You can add pages to the website if you want to link out to outside resources everybody will have access to, such as your company's event calendar, or current events with open registrations.
Step 2: We listed the reports we run and share in two categories: the share once-and-done reports, which is better suited to be run, exported, and emailed the old-fashioned way; and the evolving reports, which must be consulted several times by our stakeholders, which the Access Portal is the perfect platform for.
Step 3: We identified our stakeholders and organized them in groups based on the reports they should have access to. If some individuals get access to different groups' reports, that's ok: Portal Users can be added to more than one Portal User Group. It is seamless for the user and handy for you, so you don't have to keep track of who gets what on an individual basis. That said, you can have individual Portal Users be top-level Guests, meaning you can publish reports directly to them.
For example, let's say your Accounting Department wants the Revenue Report while your Marketing Department wants the Reference ID Report. Your CEO wants to see both reports, plus the Registration & Attendance Report. Your portal's Guests list could look like this:
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- CEO
- Accounting Department Head
- Conference Accountant
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- CEO
- Marketing Head
- Social Media Manager
- Advertising Emails Manager
This way, your CEO gets to see all three reports when they log in, while your other users only see the one their group has access to.
Step 3: Create the users in the Access Portal. The order is: create the individual Access Portal Users, then create the Access Portal User Groups, and add the users to them, then add the Access Portal User Groups to the Access Portal (in the Guests tab).
Step 4: Publish reports! Reports are published from within each event. We agreed on a template for each type of report we publish, for consistency. Note that a naming convention will be important, because the reports are listed alphabetically in the Access Portal, and because the default Cvent reports don't contain the name of the event! Our agreement was to have the year + name of the event come first, then the title of the report.
Step 5: Our Access Portal is ready, time to invite our users. From within the Guests tab of the Access Portal, you can select the Groups and Users, and send the Invite within the Actions menu. In the Invitation email, that initial link to create a password only lasts 24 hours. You might want to explain it in big letters in the invite itself!
If the code has expired, you can resend the email from the Guests tab. If the individual whose code has expired is part of an Access Portal User Group, you will have to either resend the invitation to the whole group, or add the individual as a top-level Guest so you can send the email just to them (doing so does not change their report access, but might clutter that list of eligible users when you publish a report).
Step 6: Sit back and relax: your stakeholders can now access your event reports all on their own.
Resources:
You made it all the way to the bottom of this post, congrats! Don't hesitate to share your own stories and tricks for using the Access Portal through this discussion below. #CventTip
Cheers,
#ReportingandInsights------------------------------
Béline FALZON
Conference Program Specialist II
California Teachers Association
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