SurveyMethods’ Event Registration surveys allow you to set attendee limits so that you can ensure that when your event is full, additional respondents cannot respond Yes to your event. You can also set up a waitlist so that invitees can add themselves to the waitlist and be notified if a space opens.
Setting Attendee Limit and Enabling Waitlist
You can configure your attendee limit and waitlist settings when you create your event registration survey or add an event question to your existing survey, on the event details page.
If you set the attendee limit and enable a waitlist, once the event is full respondents will see an “Event Full” watermark on the event details, will no longer be able to respond “Yes” to your event, and will now have an additional option to be added to the waitlist:
If you did not configure an attendee limit and waitlist when you set up the event, you can do so from the survey design page by clicking Full Question Edit on your event question:
You can also access this from the My Events page by navigating to either the Survey Settings or Manage Survey menu from the My Surveys page:
On Survey Settings, choose My Events on the lower left side:
If you are in the Manage Survey menu, My Events can be found on the right side under Manage Your Events:
From there you can click the Edit icon to edit your event:
Question edit will bring up the same event setup page as when you originally created the event. You can adjust the attendee limit and waitlist settings towards the bottom of the page. Note that the survey will need to be closed in order to edit the event.
Once you update the settings and click Save, you can make the survey live again by clicking the “Closed” link from the My Surveys page.
Managing Your Waitlist
Once your survey is live and has begun receiving responses, you can view and manage the waitlist from the My Events page. As shown above, the My Events page can be accessed from the Survey Settings or Manage Survey menus by clicking the My Events link.
To view and manage the waitlist, click on the Manage Waitlist link:
At the top of the Manage Waitlist page you will see the status of your event, including your attendee limit, the number of “Yes” responses, remaining spots, and how many respondents are on your waitlist.
You can adjust the attendee limit by clicking the “Edit Limit” link and then changing the number of spots available.
Below that you will see three tabs: Waitlisted Guests, Invited Guests, and RSVP’d. These tabs include your waitlist information. On the first tab, shown above, you will see a list of respondents who are currently on your waitlist, including how they accessed the survey (email or web URL), their registered email address, and the date and time they joined the waitlist.
You can search for email addresses using the search bar at the top, and you can filter the waitlist by access type (email or web URL) or only for respondents with a registered email address. On the right side you can choose how many respondents to show per page.
You can select one or more respondents by checking the boxes on the left side, and then there are two actions you can take: Change RSVP and Send Invitation:
Change RSVP allows you to move invitees off the waitlist by changing their response to any of the other options: Yes, No, or Maybe.
If your event is full, you will not be able to change a respondent’s RSVP to “Yes” without first increasing the attendee limit. You can use this feature if you need to add certain respondents to the event and don’t want to invite all guests on the waitlist.
The Send Invitation link allows you to send an email to the selected guest or guests, notifying them of information about the event or that a spot has opened up. For example, if an existing guest changes their response from attending to not attending, opening up a spot for the event, you may choose to send an invitation to the first guest (or few guests) on the waitlist to let them know there is a spot available and allow them to change their response.
Once you have sent an invitation to a respondent, they will move from the Waitlisted Guests tab to the Invited Guests tab.
On this tab, you can also select the respondent and change their response using the Change RSVP button. They will also be able to access the event from the invitation email and change their response.
Once a guest’s status has been changed to “Yes” (attending), they will be moved to the “RSVP’d” tab.
This feature makes it easy to manage a waitlist for your event so you can ensure the event is full and also make sure that the right guests are invited when space opens up.
Be sure to check out our help article on Managing Your Event Using SurveyMethods’ Event Registration Surveys for a complete overview on all of the event registration features of SurveyMethods.