How to increase event participant counts without creating constituents

Connor VeryConnect
Connor VeryConnect
Name Dropper Facilitator 1 First Anniversary
edited December 2025 in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® APIs

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?

Answers

  • Erik Leaver
    Erik Leaver Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    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
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    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.

    image.png

    @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.

  • Erik Leaver
    Erik Leaver Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Connor VeryConnect @Alex Wong I've verified that constituent_id is NOT required.

    • If you include constituent_id & no host_id, then you get a “Host” participant.
    • Then you can create “Guest” participants linked to that “Host” by either specifying the constituent_id + host_id OR you leave constituent_id blank and only pass host_id (this gets you an Unnamed Guest aka ‘Guest of [host name]’).

    Connor, this gives you the option of creating a non-constituent guest. If you have their name you can easily update the non-constituent guest record using the cons_id that's returned.

    We'll update the documentation to clarify.

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