Event management, calendar invites, and notifications are what we do best here at Virtually.

We've added a ton of functionality to our events tab in recent months, so we've pulled together this list to get you fully up to speed on everything you can do with events in Virtually!

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 learners 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!

If you need to edit an event for any reason, you'll only be able to edit certain fields. Including:

We're currently working to enable editing of additional fields, but in the meantime, here are some solutions for if you need to edit an event:

We're working to make sure we have full event syncing between Google Calendar and Virtually, but that's not live quite yet. Once it is, any chance you make in Virtually will be reflected in Google Calendar and vice versa.

When the 'Send email and calendar invitations..." toggle is ON, this notifies all event invitees in one of two ways.

Via a Google Calendar Invite:

Learners will receive an email that looks like the image below. The invite will also appear on their personal Google Calendars (it appears as a white block until the learner accepts the invite):

Note: Admins that have integrated with Google Calendar will send Google Calendar notifications. Admins that have not integrated will send an email notification like the one below.

Invitees will receive an email that looks like this letting them know that they've been invited to an event that was created in Virtually:

If you toggle ON the 'Send a reminder to all invited guests', learners will receive reminders via email (and Slack, if you've integrated) and the times you selected. That email looks like this:

Note: Event join buttons are disabled until 10 minutes prior to an event start time. This ensures we're able to get accurate data for attendance tracking!

If you'd like to invite a subgroup of leaners to an event (or series of recurring events), it's really easy to leverage tags.

When you select a tag when creating an event, the following will happen:

However:

We've seen quite a few programs in our day, and we've learned a thing or two about what really works to make sure learners know exactly where, when, and how to access class.

Here are a few tips:

Creating a new calendar in GCal is easy. Just log in to your calendar (for our purposes, you'll want to log in to the calendar with the email associated with your virtually GCal integration) .

From there, head to Settings ➡️ Add Calendar ➡️ Create a new calendar.

You can create separate calendars for each of your cohorts, or a general calendar with your entire school!

You can also easily share calendars with your learners, which is a good option if you've chosen not to send calendar invites. Sharing a calendar gives learners the choice as to whether they want events to appear on their personal calendas or not.

You can find a deep dive on sharing calendars here.

And there you have it! Questions, concerns? Just send us a note on intercom or reach out directly to hello@tryvirtually.com and we'll be happy to help you out. 😄