New Events Features

Over the course of the summer, we've released a bunch of new events features aimed at making organizations' events programs more powerful and easier for supporters. While these new releases are all included in our Weekly Release Notes (which you can subscribe to and have sent directly to your inbox), we wanted to also collect those changes here. Here's what's new:

Lookup Pages

We've made a bunch of changes to the supporter experience of public event lookup pages. These changes affect all of the main public event lookup pages: the local organizing map (/local), the public-facing all events page (/events), and calendar lookup pages (/calendar/foo). In particular: 

• Sort logic: We've updated the sorting logic for these event lookup pages. The new sorting logic better balances the geographic distance that the attendee would need to travel to an event and the how far in the future the event takes place. 
• Featured: We're now allowing admins to feature events on lookup pages. Featured events will be shown at the top of the unsearched lookup pages and will be promoted to the top of the search results (if the event would have been included in those search results). Admins can promote events by going to the event > Admin page and toggling the featured toggle. 
  
  
  
• Region, event type, and label filters: We're now supporting new filters on public lookup pages. Your supporters can now filter results by publicly-visible regions, event types, and labels. By default, regions and labels are still not publicly visible, but admins can choose to make them publicly visible if they'd like. Once publicly-visible, these different options will be added to the Show advanced filters options on these lookup pages.
  
  When using regions, a publicly-visible region's events will also include the events of any of that region's child regions. 
  
  These filters can be used before or after entering a search term, and admins can also share URLs that are pre-filtered.
• Virtual only: We've added a new filter that will allow supporters to exclude in-person events and only view virtual events. 

Event Shifts

We now support event shifts! Shifts are an optional new setting for events, which allows hosts to specify when attendees should arrive for more complicated events, like canvasses, tabling events, or staffing a volunteer office. 

The shifts tools are included in the event host's settings page, and event hosts (or admins) can configure as many shifts as needed to support their event. 

Once configured, prospective attendees will be asked to choose which shifts they'd like to attend. 

Hosts are then able to see their attendees by shift (or the full attendee list without shifts) while managing their events. Shifts information is also available to admins, included in exports, and synced to EveryAction/NGPVAN.

Event Creation and Hosting

We've made various updates to the process for creating an event and the event hosts tools. 

• We've updated the virtual event creation form so that the timezone dropdown will be automatically updated to match the virtual event's audience location. If needed, this timezone selection can still be overridden by the event host.
• Event hosts can now disable contact messages if they don't want to be contacted by site visitors.
• We've updated the display of the event creation form to make it more mobile friendly. 
• Our offline host recruitment feature now supports virtual events too.

External Events

We've also made improvements to our external events features. External events are now included in the admin all events page (/org/events). From this page, admins are able to see the information we've ingested about the event. We're also now allowing admins to add labels to external events, add external events to groups, add external events to calendars, and feature external events on lookup pages. 

To make it easier for admins to manage the newly expanded list of events, we've added a new internal/external filter to the all events admin page. We've also changed the default view of that all events page to only include upcoming events by default (though admins can also view past events by clicking the Show past events link on the page. 

More to come!

We have more events work still to come, so keep an eye on our release notes for future updates!