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.

When a person attends or registers one of your events, she becomes a customer or potential customer. This customer may participate only one, or in several events, and lead  to additional gigs. It’s valuable to keep the history of attendance in  one place and understand from the first sight if you interacted with  this person before or not.

Today we make the first step in this direction with our new contact management module. Workshop Butler identifies each contact by email and keeps the history of his event attendance. No matter how the person gets into the system: through a registration  form, by importing or manual addition, you can see all details about him  on one screen.

Though a history of attendance was a logical step, we made one further by introducing companies as contacts.

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. The payment process is also different, and  attendees usually don’t pay separately.

Now you can add a company as contact, and assign a private workshop  to it. As a result, you can also keep the history of events for a  company the same way you keep the history of attendance for one person.  There are other interesting things, related to the support of private  events which we’ll share in the next article.

Obviously, these changes are only the beginning. We understand that  they are not extremely useful in their current form. However, they are a  foundation for more useful and time-saving features we have in mind.