Event Registration with CiviCRM Entity
TAS needed more flexibility with the layout and design of their event pages. The solution was CiviCRM Entity. CiviCRM Entity is a Drupal module that exposes CiviCRM entities as true Drupal entities, meaning you can manipulate CiviCRM data as you would with any other Drupal page. This module allows us to combine the event information page with the registration page so users did not have to click a “Register” button to sign up for the event. Less clicks means a higher conversion rate! CiviCRM Entity also allowed to create tabs to house even more information related to the event. For example, nearby lodging, restaurants, recommended readings, and more.
Self-Servicing Family Memberships
The Texas Archeological Society has several different types of memberships that they offer. In most cases, organizations offer memberships to individuals and require each person to sign up for the own membership. However, CiviCRM is also set up to inherit memberships between related contacts. This can be set up about the website admin by navigating to the contact record of the person with a membership, clicking on the Relationship tab, and then selecting another contact. This can sometimes be tedious and time consuming for an organization’s staff, so why not allow the members to add family members themselves? For the new TAS website, users can do this from the My Account section of the site. The membership type is checked and if they have Family membership, a special section appears that allows them to add additional household members. They simply click the link to add additional members, fill out the form, and a new CiviCRM contact is created in the system, with a relationship to the Primary Member, and the family membership is inherited for the new contact.
Thanks to CiviCRM Entity, after a related member has been added to the user’s account, we can tap into the related members’ CiviCRM contact record on the event registration page. Our custom registration form has a field called “related member.” If a member already has related members added to their account, the drop down field is populated with each member’s names. The user can select the related member and the form fields will be auto-populated with details from the person’s contact record to speed up the registration process for each additional participant.
