As a live online program administrator, you've probably experienced how tedious it can be to send event invites to multiple groups of students over and over again.

Luckily, event creation is really Virtually's special sauce.

With Virtually you can easily create events for specific groups of learners by leveraging tags. These events will auto-export to your calendar of choice, in addition to sending an invite and email notification to those you've chosen to invite.

As you've probably already seen, creating events in Virtually is easy. Just click 'New Event' from the Calendar Tab (in Admin View) or on the Overview or Events Page (in Program View).

Let's briefly walk through the event creation drawer that appears:

Start off with your event name, and click the 'Add description' button to uncover an additional space to add details of your event.

For date and time, you're making your selections for your first event only! If you're making a recurring event, there's a button for that later.

That said, if you're scheduling an event that's on 10/11 from 3:30pm-4:30pm. Here's how you'd do it:

Now, let's say that event will occur for a series of weeks on Mondays and Wednesdays until 1/11/22. In that case, you'd click the 'Does Not Repeat' button to uncover additional settings. From there, you can choose the recurrence type ('Weekly' is the most common) and the date of your last occurrence. This is how you'd add that information:

Now it's time to add a conferencing link. Although you have a few different options, we recommend Zoom so you can get the most functionality. (Either way - attendance tracking works for all conferencing types! Hooray!)

Once you select Zoom, you have the opportunity to choose a Zoom host (associated with your integrated Zoom account, of course), and choose some of your additional preferred features as well.

We've also implemented 'Alternative Hosts', where you can select multiple potential Zoom hosts to start a given event. This is really helpful in case an instructor needs to miss class!

Note: alternative hosts will appear only when you've selected a licensed Zoom user on you account. That means alternative hosts isn't available for users with free Zoom accounts.

Next up you'll be prompted to choose your guests. The beauty of Virtually is that the system already knows who your learners are! That means you'll never need to copy and paste email lists from another source.

You can choose to invite your entire school (all learners in your account), a specific program, or tags (students that have been split into sub-groups). It looks like this:

When you click ' Add event security' you'll see a drop down menu with the following options:

Here's what those options mean and what will happen:

Unrestricted: Anyone can join the event

If you select this option, anyone with access to the link will be able to get into your event. However, if they aren't in your member roster in your Virtually account, they will see a pop-up telling them that they're not in the system and therefore won't receive attendance credit. Those users will appear in your attendance report as guests.

Only members and invited guests can enter the event

If you select this option, for learners to access your event they'll need to be in your member database in your Virtually account. Anyone that enters an email not in your member database will be denied entry to your event.

Only invited guests can enter the event

If you select this option, only invited guests can access the event. That means, if you've invited the 'October 2021' tag to your event, they will be the only ones that can join. Other members in your member database or outside users will be denied entry.

Next, you'll have the opportunity to choose exactly how your event gets shared.

1. If you've integrated a Google Calendar, you'll have the option to export the events you create to that calendar. Of course, while you can only integrate with a Google Calendar associated with a single email, you can select as many calendars as you'd like! This is especially useful if you have different google calendars for different programs. (More on that later.)

2. By leaving the 'Send email and calendar invitations..." toggle ON, you'll send a Google Calendar Invite to all leaners in your selected guest groups about your upcoming event.

Note: Guest lists are now automatically hidden to all learners!

3. The 'Send a reminder to all invited guests' toggles allows you to create up to 3 auto-reminders that will go out to your learners up to 24 hours ahead of your event. These reminders will go out via email, and if you've integrated with Slack, they'll go out via Slack as well. All reminders include the conferencing link!

4. By leaving the 'Send a post-session feedback survey to attended guests' toggle ON, Virtually will auto-send a survey only to learners that attended that session. These surveys will go out via email and responses will be recorded as an additional tab in attendance reports. The survey looks like this:

Learn more about our survey feature here.

Once you've added the details of your event, click Next. This final step gives you an opportunity to review your event and make sure everything looks good to go before setting it live!

Once you've created your event, you'll be able to see who has RSVP'ed right from within Virtually. Just head to the calendar page and open your event to get a snapshot:

Or click 'See all' to see the full RSVP list:

And boom! There you have it. Pretty soon we'll be adding a draft events feature so you can create events, save them as drafts, and publish them / send them out to learners only once you're ready!