This guide takes you from an empty account to the first invitation sent, through everything that actually matters. The path is the same whether you are running a dinner for twenty or an opening for eight hundred.
It is worth getting the shape of it in your head first, because everything else follows from it.
- Contacts are your address book: people, with their details, independent of any single event.
- An event is a date, a place and a list of guests.
- A guest is a contact attached to an event. The same contact can be a guest at ten different events: their details stay in one place.
- A campaign is an email sent to the guests of an event: the invitation, the reminder, the thank you note.
- A landing page is the public page where people answer the invitation.
In short: contacts become guests of an event, the campaign reaches them, the landing page collects the answers, check-in records who turns up.
Before you start
You need an account with at least one verified sending domain: without it you can prepare everything but send nothing. If you have not done it yet, start from Set up your sending domain — five minutes, plus however long DNS takes to propagate.
1. Create the event
- Go to Events and click New event.
- Fill in the Details: name, event type, when, where, and the language you will be speaking to your guests in. The language decides which language the automatic emails and the landing page come out in.
- Upload an event image if you have one: it is reused in the emails and on the public pages, and it is the difference between an anonymous invitation and a recognisable one.
- Save.
The same screen carries three options worth deciding on right away, because they change what your guests experience.
| Option | When you want it |
|---|---|
| Send QR code for access | When you want to check people in by scanning at the door rather than looking names up by hand |
| Enable slots | When entry is staggered into time slots and every guest has to pick one |
| Companions | When a guest may bring other people along, and you want to know how many |
The Mail settings section governs the automatic confirmation and refusal emails, the ones that go out when somebody answers the invitation. Leave them alone and the defaults are used.
2. Bring your contacts in
If your address book is already in Eventleash, skip this step.
Otherwise go to Contacts and import the list you have: an Excel or CSV file is fine. During the import you map the columns of your file onto Eventleash fields, and from then on that list is yours for good — you will not have to import it again for the next event.
3. Add the guests
Open the event: the event page *is* the list of its guests.
- Add guest picks from the address book, or creates someone who is not in it yet on the spot.
- Import guests loads a file straight onto this event, for when the list arrives from the client the day before.
- From the Contacts page you can do the reverse: select people and sign them up to an event in bulk.
From here on every row carries its own states, and this is the screen you will live on until the day of the event: Invited (the mail has gone out), Confirmed, Not confirmed, No answer, and on the day itself Checked in.
4. Prepare the answer page
The invitation has to land somewhere. Go to Landing pages, create a new one for your event and pick the RSVP type: that is the page where a guest confirms or declines, declares their companions and, if you enabled them, picks a slot.
Adjust colours, image and copy as much as you need, then publish it. The landing page is also where you ask for privacy consents, if you need them.
5. Build and send the campaign
- Go to Campaigns, click New campaign and pick the event.
- Give it a campaign name (only you see it) and write the email subject, which is what recipients will read.
- Pick the email template and make it yours. You can start from a saved one with Load template and, once you are happy with the result, save yours to reuse at the next event.
- Fill in the email preview text: it is the line most mail clients show next to the subject. Leaving it empty is a wasted opportunity.
- Save, then add the recipients: all the event's guests, or select guests if you only want to write to some of them — those who have not answered yet, for instance.
- Send a test to yourself and read the mail on a phone, not only on a computer.
- When it all looks right, Send — or Schedule it to go out at a given time.
6. Follow the answers
Open the campaign and you see, row by row, what became of every message: Delivered, Opened, and the states that deserve attention — Bounced (the address does not exist, or refused the message) and Blocked (the person unsubscribed, or had already been flagged).
The event page shows you the other half: who confirmed, who declined, who has not answered yet. That is where the second campaign comes from — the reminder to everyone still silent.
7. On the day
From the event page open Live check-in: it is the screen built for the door, meant for a phone or a tablet. You search for a guest by name, or scan the QR code they got by email, and record them in.
If you enabled companions, at check-in you record how many people actually walked in — which is not always the number that was announced.
What next
The second event will cost you far less than the first: the address book is in, the template is saved, the domain is verified. You can also simply duplicate the event you just created and start from there.