How to increase event participant counts without creating constituents

Connor VeryConnect

We are working on an integration between our events platform and the RE events system for a client. We want the guest counts on our platform to be the same as the participant count on RE.

We don't want to have to create a new constituent for every participant (bookings may be anonymous, would require more complex deletion logic).

The CreateParticipant API docs say that you can create a participant without a constituent ID (here), but this fails consistently for us.

We also considered using a new custom field to store the participant count, but the API endpoint for that is still in preview here. We don't know when the preview will end.

Is there any way to do what we're trying to achieve here?

Erik Leaver

Hi, take a look at the approach used here:

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/73164/create-event-participant-without-creating-a-constituent-first

Using a custom field should be fine if that's the direction you want to go. I wouldn't expect a breaking change at this point.

Alex Wong

Creating a Participant record requires a constituent id being passed in, @Erik Leaver this is a documentation error that say the field is not Required.

@Connor VeryConnect using custom field would not make sense, as it becomes a field that requires updating whenever guest count changes. I don't know how the other events platform works, but it makes no sense to not properly code guests to an event as participants.