Can I capture information about my attendees prior to the event?

Modified on Fri, 12 Apr at 3:17 PM

With the PTA Events platform you can capture as much information as you need to run your events efficiently and effectively.

There are two ways you can capture information about your attendees.

Product Questions

Product questions enable you to capture information about a specific product purchased. For example, if you are running a Summer Ball you may need to ask your guests to choose from a menu and you would need to have answers for each person attending. To access your products, browse to "Admin" > "Events" and then click "Tickets / Products" from your event management menu.

When you have a product eg "Summer Ball Ticket", click "Product Questions" from your product management menu:

If you have used an event template to create your event then there may already be some product questions defined. To add a new product question, click "Add product question". You will then be able to define your question:

Name	The question you would like to ask
Description	A description with further information for the customer to help them answer the questions
Type	The type of question. This can be Text (simple text response), Descriptive text (longer text response), Number (number must be entered), Yes / No (choice of yes or no), Single select (must choose one of a number of options), Multi select (must choose any number of options), File (can upload a file of a specified type which must not exceed 2MB - see options below), Date (must enter a valid date) and terms (must agree to defined terms).
Max length	For text questions you can restrict answers to a maximum length. For example 6 will prevent any answers being added greater than 6 characters.
Min value	For number questions you can ensure answers are of a minimum value. For example, if you wanted to ask ensure that attendees were of a certain age, you could enter 6 here to ensure that no attendees under the age of 6 could be added.
Max value	For number questions you can ensure answers are of a maximum value. For example, if you wanted to ask ensure that attendees were under a certain age, you could enter 14 here to ensure that no attendees over the age of 14 could be added.
Options	Comma delimited list of options for single and multi select questions eg Ham & Melon,Soup,Prawn Cocktail. If type is file then you can define a comma delimited list of file types to upload eg PNG,JPEG,JPG,GIF
Required	Is it compulsory that this question should be answered?
Display answer on ticket	Do you want the answer displayed on the ticket?
Prevent duplicates	Do you want to prevent duplicate answers being selected? If selected then no two people can enter the same information or choose the same option from an available list.
Encrypt answers	Do you want to add an additional layer of protection with the answers to be encrypted in the database? Note that all data is already encrypted at rest and in transit. This will add an additional layer of security and is enabled by default.
Sort order	This will allow you to have control over how your questions are ordered.

When your customers add this product to their basket they will be forced to provide more information before they can checkout:

Event Questions

If you only need to capture information once during checkout, then you can do this by adding a product of type "Event Questions", which can be found in "Admin" > "Events"> "Tickets/Products" > "Manage" > "Add Product":

Make sure your event questions product has a high stock quantity so you don't sell out and set the price to be zero so there's no payment required. You can then add product questions to it as you normally would. Unlike normal product questions, event questions only get asked once during the checkout process if the customer purchases any item from that event. The event questions product is also not visible in the shop and is added to the basket behind the scenes.

You can use an event questions product without any questions. For example, you may want to sell tea towels that aren't personal but only want to know the name of the eldest child in the school who should receive delivery of them to take them home. Just ensure you check "Ask for name & class" in your event questions product settings and change the "Booking label" to "Eldest child's name".

You could have event questions defined for each different event / product group that you have on sale to ensure you capture all the information you need.