Managing Community Events submissions

After a user submits an event via the Community Event form, a new event post is created that can be managed from the site admin Dashboard just like any regular event.

Note that the Community Events feature is an add-on of the Blackbaud Website Package (BBWP) offering. Contact your Blackbaud Sales Representative for more information.

Review your settings

When getting started with the Community Events add-on, it’s important to verify your Event Submission settings by going to Events → Settings → Community and reviewing the available options.

First, you’ll want to decide if your site will allow anonymous submissions or not. With this feature disabled, only users with registered accounts on your site may submit events. An anonymous user will be prompted to login before accessing the submission form.

Please note that if you want site visitors to be able to register and then submit an event, you’ll need to make sure you have the Anyone can register option selected on the General Site Settings page that your Blackbaud Consultant controls. Otherwise only users with pre-existing accounts on your site will be able to submit events.

Secondly, you’ll want to review the Default status for submitted events option, since this will determine whether or not events need to be reviewed by a site administrator (Client Role) prior to displaying on the site. The following status options are available:

• Draft – submissions in this status will not display on the site until marked as ‘Published’ by a site administrator (Client role)
• Pending Review – This status allows admins to more easily see when a submission needs to be reviewed. Submissions in this status will not display on the site until marked as ‘Published’ by site administrator (Client role).
• Published – submissions in this status will be publicly accessible on your site as soon as the person submits the event.

After reviewing your Event Submission settings, you’ll want to scroll down the page a bit and review your Alert settings. This will allow you to determine who will receive email notifications when a new event is submitted. This can be important if you have chosen ‘Draft’ or ‘Pending Review’ for the default submission status since a site administrator (Client role) will need to take action on every submission.

The email address(es) listed there will get an email whenever an event is submitted. Here’s an example:

reCAPTCHA Settings

Community Events’ reCAPTCHA settings are located at Events → Settings → APIs tab.

Once your reCAPTCHA settings are entered, it will only appear if you enabled Anonymous Submissions and the user is not logged in (i.e. not anonymous).

Reviewing submitted events

After events are submitted, they appear in the event list just like any other event. As a site administrator (Client role), you can review event submissions by going to your event list (by clicking on Events on the left-side of the site admin Dashboard). If you have the ‘Draft’ status enabled, then you’ll notice that submitted events display as drafts.

Draft Events

If you have the ‘Pending Review’ status enabled, then you’ll notice that submitted events displays as ‘Pending.’

Events Pending Review

Next, just click on the event that you’d like to review, make your necessary edits, and then click Publish.

Review and publish the Event!