Life cycle of an event

The life cycle of an event

Event passes several phases:

1. Creation

2. Invitation (optional)

3. Registration (optional)

4. Attendance capture

5. Report

6. Event closure

7. Send event report (newsletter)

Step 1 – Creation

The timeline begins in Polaris with the creation of the event in Club life > Calendar / Reports. For club events the active members, prospects and guests are inserted as potential participants into the participant list at the creation time. For district events the participant list is empty. The participant list can be extended manually with members from any club and with other people.

Newly created event is inactive in the web and it's visibility is set to All members (own unit) by default. Consider the guide Data protection (GDPR) when setting the visibility. The Polaris team strongly advises to consider making events non-public for the sake of GDPR.

Before you make the event visible on the web consider the registration details, questions and answers you want to get from the participants.

REGISTRATION

Once the participants start registering, it is no longer possible to modify the questions!

Step 2 – Invitation (optional)

The organizer issues an invitation i.e. an announcement of a future event to the invited audience. Invitation is optional and can occur by email or just by publishing the event on the website in the slider or in the carousel. Events with regular schedule usually do not have an invitation. Invitation by email can be created directly in the "Participants" tab of that event. The created email is visible in the Menu "Club life > Emails" and can be modified there before sending. The invited audience can be defined by means of predefined recipient groups and can be extended with members of the community or with any email addresses.

Step 3 – Registration (optional)

Registration can be enabled in the "Registration" tab of the event. After making the event visible on the web and enabling registration, people can register to that event. Registration is a confirmation of a prospective participation or denial of participation to a future event. The registration is recorded in the event and is visible in the tab "Participants" and in the event in frontend.

The visibility of the event indirectly defines who can register. If the event is public, any person can register. People who are not currently listed as participants will be automatically included once they complete the registration form. For every logged-in Polaris user, the registration form automatically populates with their personal data. Duplicates can occur when users do not log in before registering or when people register twice with different names. An email of confirmation with his/her choices is sent to the person. This makes it necessary to login first and eliminates the problem with duplicates.

If registration is active, there is a deadline for signing up for the event. The participants can alter or cancel their registration before this deadline. While the registration period is active, the organizers – can be multiple, defined in the "General" tab – will receive an email notification for each registration, de-registration or registration change, including all registration options (answers).

After the deadline has passed, the location contacts – can be multiple, defined in the "General" tab – will receive an email with a link to the final participant list as excel sheet. This list contains basic participant data and their responses. Recipients of such participant lists are often restaurants.

For detailed information see Registration settings.

Step 4 – Attendance capture

An attendance is the confirmation of the physical appearance of the participant to an event. The purpose of the attendance capture is to keep track on the effective presence of the participants and of their payments. Attendance is recorded in the event in the "Participants" tab. The capture can be easily performed manually in the participants list, or by scanning the QR code of the participants (see below).

Alternatively, the attendance list can be printed out via "Export" button, signed by the participants and manually entered by an administrator.

Attendance capture with QR code

The attendance capture can be simplified by scanning the QR code of the members. The one in charge opens the event on his smartphone and clicks on the "Participants" button in the event detail page. Then he invokes the camera by clicking on the "Scan QR-Code" button and starts the scanning process.

The attendees present their personal QR code either on smartphone or printed on a sticker. The individual QR code is available on smartphones or tablets by clicking on the blue “Login” icon () in the top-right corner, or by invoking the NAVIGATION icon () > MY SETTINGS. The printed stickers with the QR codes can be made available by the administrator or printed by the members themselves. For a members missing both his smartphone and his sticker, one can prepare a pre-printed set of all members QR codes (see Printed formats of the QR codes).

NOTE

The QR code is an encoded representation of the Polaris-ID and Rotary-ID. No other data is present in the code.

Successful scan is confirmed by a beep, errors are signaled as quack-tone. Visual message shows the scan outcome. Duplicate scans are detected.

QR code scanning is applicable to all members of the club, i.e. to active members, guests, prospects and other contacts, but also to any active member of the same Multi-District.

Step 5 – Report

The best way to record the club's history is to attach the minutes of events directly to the event. Event reports are created by modifying or replacing the main text block that announced the event and by adding photos from the event.

NOTE

Modern communication of reports is done by an attractive newsletter containing links to these reports, together with the announcement of future events and news. See also step 7.

Example:

• Insert content block 1 as "Text/HTML" and move it to the top position.

• Enter a heading, for example "Report" (formatting style: Title 3) and record it as text

• Optional: Insert separator (xl) and move it to the 2nd position

• Use the "Primary image and text" for the program's documentation (without the "Program" heading, it will look very appealing in the announcement text of the newsletter).

• Optional: Insert separator (xl)

• Optional: Attach files, integrate a photo gallery directly, or create it separately and reference it in the report.

For more information about designing an article, see the Content blocks.

Step 6 – Event closure

The purpose of the closure is to finalize all transactions related to this event. The presence points are assigned to the attendees and fees are deducted from the financial accounts of the members (if activated).

A closed event can be re-opened to correct the attendance. Financial transactions cannot be undone for audit reasons. Compensating reverse transactions are issued in such a case.

Step 7 – Send event report (newsletter)

Contemporary report communication is conducted through an engaging newsletter that includes links to these reports, along with announcements of upcoming events and general updates from the club (e.g., news).

Ideally, a newsletter template titled "CLUB-NEWS - Weekly Report" is created in the club. For each weekly report, you can duplicate it and inform the members about the last meeting and include additional information (news, next events, …).

Once you have added the desired event as an article in the newsletter, you can preview it.

By clicking the "Learn more" button in the email, the report for this event will open directly in the web browser.