Events and RSVPs

Events is for the fish fry, the parish picnic, the mission nights — anything people sign up for. You describe it once, publish it, and Vianney gives you a public page anyone can book from, a roster you can trust at the door, and a waitlist that fills itself when someone drops out. Booking receipts go out on their own; nothing else is emailed without a person confirming it.

Open Events in the navigation. It has two tabs — All events and Settings — and a New event button in the corner.

The list opens on Upcoming, so the first thing you see is what is still to come. The chips above it — Upcoming, Previous events, All, Drafts, Published, Canceled — change what you are looking at, and under Previous events the date column becomes Held on instead of Next date.

An event whose dates have all finished shows a quiet completed badge in place of the green *published* one. That is worked out from the event's own dates — the last one having ended, not merely started — so an event running right now still reads as published and still sits under Upcoming. It is not a status you set and not one you can set: an event is a draft, published, canceled, or archived, and *completed* is simply what Vianney can see about a published one.

Create an event

• 1. Press New event. Give it a Title, a Location, and a Description (plain text — this is what parishioners read on the public page).
• 2. Set Capacity per date if there is a limit, and tick Waitlist when a date is full if you would rather keep taking names than turn people away. If this is an event people turn out to *help* at — the fish fry crew, festival setup — pick it under This event is volunteering for; the list offered there is your parish's own, kept under Engagement → Setup.
• 3. Choose One time and pick the date and time, or make it repeating — every week, every two weeks, or monthly on the same weekday of the month. A repeating event runs until a date you name or for a number of dates. Vianney writes the rule back to you in plain words (*Every two weeks on Friday, 6:00 PM until 12/19/2026*) so there is no guessing.
• 4. Press Create event. It is saved as a draft — nothing is public yet — and its dates appear in a table below.

Publish it and share the link

• 1. Press Publish. The public sign-up page goes live and its link appears right underneath.
• 2. Press Copy and paste it wherever you like — the bulletin, an email, a button in a Connect message. Anyone with the link can sign up while the event is published.
• 3. Unpublish takes the page down again without touching anybody's booking.

If a link has travelled somewhere you would rather it hadn't, press New link. That mints a fresh one and every copy of the old link stops working at once — a real kill switch, not a hidden page. Re-share the new link with the people who should have it.

How the public page looks

By default the page carries your parish's own styling and the event's details. If you would like something more like a poster, press Design this page in Canva on the event and walk the three steps — see Designing a page in Canva. The old Print flyer and QR poster buttons are gone; Canva is the print pipeline now, and it does the job far better.

What a parishioner does

• 1. They open the link and see the event, its dates, and whether each is Open, Waitlist, or Full. Whether they also see the exact number of seats left is your parish's choice (see Settings below).
• 2. They pick a date, give their name and email, optionally a phone number, and say how many are coming — themselves included. There is room to list the names in the party, which is a real help at a welcome table.
• 3. If the date has room, they are confirmed. If it is full and you turned the waitlist on, they join the waitlist instead. Either way a confirmation email goes to them straight away — that receipt is transactional, so it sends itself.
• 4. The receipt carries a personal manage link. They can use it any time to change their party size or the names, or to cancel — no account, no password. If they book again with the same email address, Vianney updates the reservation they already have rather than creating a second one.

A parishioner signed in to the parishioner portal is recognized, and their booking is tied to their record automatically.

Working a roster in the office

Open the event and click one of its dates — each date keeps its own roster.

• The header counts what matters: parties, souls, the cap, and a Full badge when there is no room left.
• The table lists each booking: name (with the party's names underneath), contact details, party size, and where it came from — public, portal, or office.
• Attended — for a booking you have matched to a person record, the last column offers Came, No-show, or a dash for not yet known. Nothing is ever marked for you: signing up is an intention, coming is a fact, and only somebody who was there can say which. A finished event keeps its roster and this control, which is exactly when attendance usually gets recorded. What you mark is written to that person's record, and the change is logged.
• The waitlist sits below in sign-up order, numbered. When seats free up, the earliest parties that fit are promoted automatically and each gets its own email receipt.
• Download CSV gives you the roster as a spreadsheet; Print prints just the roster card, nothing else on the screen.
• Cancel on a row cancels that booking. Freed seats promote the waitlist at once, and that person's manage link stops working.

Walk-ins at the desk

Somebody rings up, or arrives at the parish office with cash in hand. At the foot of the roster, type their name, an email if they have one (it is optional here), and the party size, then press Add to roster. It goes through the same capacity check as any other sign-up — if the date is full it lands on the waitlist and Vianney tells you so. Office walk-ins never get a manage link, so nothing goes out to an address you were unsure of.

Matching a sign-up to a parishioner

A booking from the public page arrives unmatched on purpose: Vianney does not guess who anyone is. Press Match on the row and it shows you up to five likely person records — no more, because six is not a shortlist, it is a shrug. Click the right one and the booking is linked; the row then offers Open person and an unlink if you change your mind. If nothing is close, Vianney says so plainly — *no close match; identity is never guessed* — and you leave it unlinked. Linking is always a person's decision and it is recorded.

Changing one date, or calling the whole thing off

• Set a Cap this date on any row to override the event's capacity for that date alone; leave it blank to go back to the default.
• Cancel on a date takes just that one off the public page. A hand-edited date is marked edited, and later changes to the series skip it — what you set by hand stays set by hand.
• Cancel event… takes every remaining date off the public page and stops the link accepting sign-ups. Rosters stay on file. If anyone is registered, the confirm offers to *email the registered parties that it's canceled* — one tick, one press, and it goes; untick it and nobody is emailed.

Volunteering, or turnout

What a confirmed booking becomes on a person's record depends on how the event is tagged, and it only ever happens for a booking a person has matched to a parishioner — identity is never guessed, so an unmatched sign-up is never derived into anything.

• On an event tagged under This event is volunteering for, each confirmed, matched booking joins that person's volunteering history under the opportunity you chose. Because it counts as service rather than turnout, the roster's Attended column shows a dash for those rows — there is nothing to mark.
• On an ordinary, untagged event, the same bookings become that person's participation — what the family actually turns up for — and Attended is how the office records who came.
• Cancel a booking, unlink the person, or cancel the date, and the derived record goes quietly with it. Restore it and it comes back; nothing is duplicated.

Settings

The Settings tab holds the parish's own defaults, not code:
- Horizon (days ahead) — how far out a repeating event creates its dates. 120 days to start with.
- Max party size — the largest party the public page will accept.
- New events start with the waitlist on — if that is usually what you want.
- Public pages show the exact seats left — off by default, so pages say only Open, Waitlist, or Full.

Who can do what

Three switches in the role access matrix govern this module: Events to open it at all (which includes reading rosters and downloading the CSV), Add new events to draft one, and Manage events & RSVPs for everything else — publishing, editing dates, walk-ins, cancelling, linking identities and the Settings tab. Faith Formation keeps Events and may add one, but publishing a public page and running the roster stay with clergy and the office by default.

Good to know

• Nothing about an event is public until you press Publish, and unpublishing takes it straight back down.
• The public page never shows anyone who else has signed up, and a manage link only ever reaches its own booking.
• Every change you make here — publishing, cancelling, linking a person, minting a new link — is written to the audit trail.