Hi all,
We've recently started using Activities to track our non-paid events, however since we're doing a lot of online events right now, our invite lists are pretty much our full email list (60k+ accounts). It's taking Tess about an hour to insert these events onto accounts, freezing all other operations. Even scheduling this to run last at night doesn't seem to be an option due to the lag time.
I'm curious if anyone else has encountered this issue and if you have any recommendations or workarounds that have worked for you? We're thinking we might have to break these giant lists into smaller lists and schedule them to run at intervals throughout the night, but I'd love to avoid that if there's a cleaner solution!
Thanks for your help. Hope everyone is staying safe and well!
Blair
My suggestion would be to break it up into smaller lists, but it sounds like you'd rather not do that. Could you maybe wait until the event is over and only add activities to the records of people who attended? I know generally it can be good to see who all was invited (including who declined to attend), but with something like this I assume you're not really getting declines for these invitations so the only data you would really have were those who accepted/attended? If you create an activity type of Online Event or make a note in the notes section that it was an online event you'll be able to still tell that the event invitation went out to everyone on your mailing list, even if they don't have the activity in their record.
Out of curiosity, is there a reason you're tracking this in Activities? I don't know what the events are, put you could create a general admission "performance" in ticketing (with a zero dollar cost per ticket) which would still track whether or not someone registered for/attended the event. You could also set up a dummy campaign in Elevated Events and when you add a list-based source to it click the "Create Event Invitations" when you promote it in the Appeal's section (though you'd have to manually go through and update them to "Attending" when someone does attend, plus you'd have to create a campaign for each online event, and you mention that you're doing a lot of them so that might be even more overwhelming).
Thank you so much for the response, Colleen! I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.
We had discussed only adding the activity to the records of those who attend, but in general we're trying to keep better records on who has been invited to which events and when, so ideally we'll find a solution that let's us accomplish the above.
We had initially been tracking all of our events in Elevated Events but since we're doing so many virtual Zoom events right now, it started to feel very cluttered.
I think the answer may end up being the smaller lists...
Thanks again!!
This may not offer as much reporting detail down the road, but would it suffice to use the promoted source code for the email invite in everyone's Connections > Promotions tab as an indicator of who got invited - and then just create full Activities for those that actually RSVP? Or are some people receiving invitations via channels other than email that need to be tracked?
It's certainly not ideal in the abstract to track the invitations in one part of the constituent record and responses in another, but I wonder if it could do the trick just to capture the baseline info you need and reduce the load on the system...
Thank you, Evan! We had considered doing it this way, but to your point, we're concerned about forgetting in a few years that we decided to track the invites in a separate place for these. I think that's certainly a great work-around if we can't figure something else out, though.
I really appreciate you taking the time to respond and share your thoughts!