I wanted to share a use case for RSVP, and some ideas for improving it to support our use case.
Two weeks ago we organized Network Members Meet and Greet event in Nairobi on 16 October, 2018 - Community Discussions - Global Legal Empowerment Network Community Discussions. We made an event topic with RSVP enabled to support the event. We also sent PMs to members in Kenya alerting them to the event. Ultimately, people RSVP’d in three different ways: by clicking the “Going” button, by adding a reply to the topic or by emailing our helpdesk. We followed up with those who RSVP’d with logistical details by sending a bulk pm (which we figured out how to do via the API). To support this process, we created a spreadsheet of people who RSVP’d containing their names, emails, and usernames.
The meet and greet was a smashing success, and we’d love to do it again when we visit various locations or even to make it easy for members to organize meetups on their own without us. But the process above was a bit cumbersome and I’m not sure we’d want to do it this way very often.
Here are some ways I think RSVP functionality could be improved to support the meet and greet organization process:
- add admin option to allow export RSVP list to CSV, for separate processing
- make it easier to invite people to RSVP by providing a URL method (e.g. click here to RSVP)
- make the RSVP button on the event topic more obvious and easy to use, e.g. by displaying a popup when people visit the topic which they can dismiss. Maybe also the word on the button can be made more inviting, e.g. “click here if you’d like to come to this event”
- close RSVP automatically when event date has passed (seems weird that people can rsvp for an event that has come and gone - is this a bug?)
- add admin options to add and manage RSVP on behalf of members (and on behalf of staged users who are not yet members but who rsvp by email)
- set topic notification level to watching for those who RSVP (same as a like)
- add RSVP status options, and admin options for managing them throughout the process. Something like this:
- registered
- confirmed
- attended
- add ability for admins to bulk message those who RSVP’d to send logistical details in private
- set up automated reminder notifications to RSVP that can be customized, to send reminders a week, day, hour ahead?