Communication with attendees via email is an integral part of any workshop. Giving your students a warm welcome right after the registration removes the fear that the registration has not happened, and helps to establish a rapport from the very beginning. Sending a reminder one or two days before the event shows participants you care about them. Asking people for feedback on their experience creates opportunities for professional growth and marketing.
The GDPR takes seriously how you collect consents to process personal data of EU citizens. The participation in a workshop gives you a legal right to work with a personal data of the attendee. However, there are more: for example, you must collect separate consents for processing personal data and subscribing to a newsletter an attendee can request anytime to review what consents were given, and how they were collected.
Being able to define what information to collect from attendees is important for many trainers. It helps them to decrease the time they spend on pre-workshop communication with participants. For example, by requesting Billing Address or Dietary Preferences. In Workshop Butler, trainers have been enjoying fully customisable registration forms for more than a year now. It is no surprise that we wanted to give this flexibility to training companies, the support for which we added about two months ago.
First, a disclaimer: the content below is provided for informational purposes only. The information shared here is not meant to serve as legal advice. You should work closely with legal and other professional counsel to determine precisely how the GDPR may or may not apply to you. As you may know, all organisations working with EU citizens’ data should be GDPR-compliant starting 25th of May, 2018. There are many terrific articles written about GDPR (for example, by MailChimp, FullStory or Hubspot) which we recommend reading to get more details.
Though Workshop Butler provides quite extensive support for automated emails before and after each event, from time to time you may need to send a manual email to event attendees. For example, an event location has changed, or you want to give additional materials before a workshop, or you decide to reach persons who registered but didn’t attend an event. With Workshop Butler, you can do it quickly, without adding many addresses to BCC or CC and checking two-three times that you included everyone.
Many trainers work with assistants who take care of workshop management. Either you are a solopreneur or work at a company, it’s always good to have someone concentrating on organisational hassle, while you prepare for a workshop. Trainer assistants may create events, handle invoices and approve evaluations. Now you can add an assistant to your account in a couple of clicks. The assistants in Workshop Butler have the same access rights as you do.
Last week we talked about contacts and the history of event attendance. We mentioned at the end that the new module is a foundation for more useful features. Today we are glad to share with you the first step in this direction. Public and private (or on-site) workshops are different. For the former, you need to market the events, accept registrations, etc. For the latter, you work with organisations and interact mostly with organisers, not participants.
From the beginning, the process of attendee management in Workshop Butler was a straight-forward. When a new person registered for a workshop, or a trainer added a person manually, a new attendee was created. Each attendee was a separate entity, attached to the event. Even if one person participated in several classes, the system didn’t detect it. Many event management tools work this way. However, the process is different in real life.
The year is almost over. Christmas rhymes sound around the world, and it is harder and harder to do quality work. So let’s have some fun and play with numbers. There were more than 1000 workshops registered and promoted via Workshop Butler in 2017. We decided to look at the feedback provided by attendees of the workshops and see if there are any differences in how participants evaluate trainers in different countries and languages.
Last few months we have been concentrated on making significant internal changes in the platform. Though they are almost behind us, and you will see a spree of new features soon enough, the process is not over yet. As a result, there are only a couple of new things we want to talk about this time. Improved Import of Attendees Back in August, a new function to import attendees to workshops appeared.