Preview: Offline Events

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Recently we've been working with 38 Degrees on a new section of the toolset: the events feature. We're hoping to roll it out this summer, but we wanted to give you all a preview and see if you have any comments or suggestions. If so, you can leave them at the bottom of this article.

The new feature allows you and your supporters to quickly and easily organize events, manage RSVPs, and allow members to connect with with each other offline. 

We were frustrated by the user experience that many of the other activism CRMs have offered to groups looking to host offline events, so we've tried to build a modern, mobile optimized experience that is easy for both organizers and members to use. 

Events are organized within calendars, which allows your organization to easily see the various efforts that are being planned and monitor the coordinated events that are occurring nationwide. Calendars can be open ended – allowing events to be organized anywhere – or constituency bound, which allows only one event per parliamentary constituency, congressional district, or other political boundary. Additionally, admins can create defaults for all events created under that calendar – presetting the date, time, or description of the event. We imagine that customers will create calendars for days of action, distributed petition deliveries, and other occasions when they'd like to solicit a certain sort of event. 

As with the existing landing pages and efforts features, calendars have public-facing hub pages, from which supporters can view the events that have been planned, search for the nearest event, and/or organize a new event.

If a user decides to create a new event within that calendar, they are brought to the create event form. Much like creating a new petition from a landing page, creating an event from a calendar adds it to the calendar hub page -- where it is discoverable by other members. 

The location box works with google to suggest possible locations. 

Each event's page will include additional details about the event, a list of attendees, and updates from the organizer.

Like petitions, events can be shared via social media or email. Event organizers will be able to contact attendees and attendees will automatically be reminded of the event 48 hours before it is scheduled.

We're working on synchronizing events to all of the CRMs we currently support, but will likely launch with deep integration support for Blue State Digital. 

What new and innovative organizing could you take on with better tools for managing offline meet ups? We're doing a lot of thinking about how events can be gracefully integrated with petition campaigns started by members, and how to support new models -- like separating large petitions into geographic chunks that can then be delivered to a target at an event that other members can attend. 

Is there anything that you'd like to see included in the new feature? Let us know below.