Double-registering guests in the Events module

Azhlee Costa

Issue: Guests who purchased their own tickets to an event, but sit at a table that was purchased by another guest are double-registered in our system and throws off the registration and attendance count for the event.

Example: The event will take place on January 22nd. Our organization sent out invitations in October. John purchased two tickets ($2,500 each) to the event for him and his wife, Jane. We received John and Jane’s RSVP in November so we registered them right away using the Registration Option: $2,500 Ticket. Their friend, Jill, purchased a table ($10,000) that seats up to 10 patrons. We received Jill’s RSVP in December without a guest list. In mid-January, Jill submits her guest list including John and Jane. When we create the seating arrangement for Jill’s table, we would be double registering John and Jane if we assign them to her table since they already purchased their own tickets and have already been registered.

Question: Is there a way to indicate that John and Jane purchased their own tickets and were Jill’s guests without registering them as both ticket purchasers and table guests?

Lois Smith

I don't think you can register someone twice.  If you are using seating functionality, you can put them at anyone's table, even if they aren't someone's "guest" in the registration.  The issue comes in is if Jill has paid for 10 seats.  Then, you have sold the seats twice and you should contact Jill and/or the other couple to decide what to do.


In the seating area, you can group people together and can group the couple with Jill and her other guests.  This makes it easy to keep people together even if they aren't registered using the guest capabilities.  You can also enter seating notes to make sure nothing gets missed, if you wish.

Azhlee Costa

Lois Smith:

I don't think you can register someone twice.  If you are using seating functionality, you can put them at anyone's table, even if they aren't someone's "guest" in the registration.  The issue comes in is if Jill has paid for 10 seats.  Then, you have sold the seats twice and you should contact Jill and/or the other couple to decide what to do.


In the seating area, you can group people together and can group the couple with Jill and her other guests.  This makes it easy to keep people together even if they aren't registered using the guest capabilities.  You can also enter seating notes to make sure nothing gets missed, if you wish.

Hi Lois,


Thank you for your reply. As you mentioned, the issue we are running into is that Jill paid for 10 seats at a table and wants John and Jane (who bought their own individual tickets) to sit at her table; essentially we've been registering/selling seats twice. 


Our events can hold 500+ guests and have flexible seating arrangements. For example, our standard table seats 10 guests, but if a guest wants 12 seats at their table then we will accommodate their request. The same goes for if a guest only wants 8 seats at their table instead of the standard 10. Seating arrangements can get very complicated for our bigger events (e.g. a fancy gala) so we want to ensure we are tracking registration and revenue correctly without duplicates. Do you know of a solution that can be carried out through the system rather than contacting the host/guests?

 

Erika Layfield

We deal with the very same issue for our large benefit events, and have had to use the less than ideal solution of using the "Assign seats" functionality to address this and then leave the 2 "seats" empty for the person who bought the table.  I think there is a lot of room for improvement in the events area, particularly for this kind of seated benefit event! I hope others can suggest a better remedy!

Rick Root

We did a customization for unnamed guests that allow us to store the guest name without creating a constituent.


You could probably do something similar and reference a constituent instead but you'd still have to do some custom reporting of course to get the attendee counts correct

Azhlee Costa

Erika Layfield:

We deal with the very same issue for our large benefit events, and have had to use the less than ideal solution of using the "Assign seats" functionality to address this and then leave the 2 "seats" empty for the person who bought the table.  I think there is a lot of room for improvement in the events area, particularly for this kind of seated benefit event! I hope others can suggest a better remedy!

Hi Erika,


How do you ensure you keep the registration count accurate when leaving empty seats?

Erika Layfield

We have a few custom reports that keep this straight.  Unfortunately, we aren't able to trust the totals on the event.  This isn't ideal, but we haven't been in a position to create a customization around this.