Guide for Trainers: How to Manage Your Own Events
Sometimes training companies invite trainers to run events, however, they do not employ these trainers.
They also create Workshop Butler accounts for them. When creating an account for such trainers, a company usually defines their working agreement as Partially-managed Trainer. Unlike full-fledged employees, partially-managed trainers have full control over their accounts and can create their own events, not related to any company.
And sometimes, licensed trainers who have their accounts created by certification brands, decide to run their own independent events.
In this article, we’ll see how partially-managed trainers and licensed trainers can create their own independent events and manage the account itself.
Tip: if you are managing an event for a training company, check this guide where we described the basics of managing events. And if you are managing an event for a certification brand, see this article.
Before an event
Create a category
Now, that you are working on your own event, you need to create your own categories, not use the ones assigned to you by a company or a brand.
To add a category:
1. Open the dropdown menu in the top right corner, click on Account Settings, and choose Categories in the Facilitation section on the left side.
2. Click on the +Add Category button in the upper part of the Categories section:
3. You should choose a name for the category and names for one or several types that belong to it. For example, a category could be Agile, and event types might be Scrum Master Course, Agile Foundation Course, etc.
4. Do not forget to click the Create button to save changes:
Later, you can edit these categories and delete them.
Connect payments
If you are planning to organise a paid event, you need to connect a payment system to accept payments from attendees.
You can do it from the Account Settings - Payments in the General section on the left.
At the moment, two options are available - Stripe and PayPal. Stripe is in public beta and you can activate it by following this article. PayPal is in closed beta so far. To learn whether it’s possible to activate it for your account, please contact our support team. We will provide you with further instructions.
In this section, you can also specify the sales tax rate in your country and activate EU VAT exemption so that the system could calculate the sales tax for tickets automatically. Read more about sales tax configuration here and about EU VAT exemption here.
Upload a certificate template
If you plan to send certificates, you need to upload a template in the Account Settings -> Certificate Templates. Read more about it here.
Create an event
Now, with all the groundwork done, you can start creating your first event.
The process is the same as creating an event for a training company. It’s described in this article. There is a lot of other useful information on this matter in the Event Configuration category of Help Center.
The list of all events you created will be available in the same tab - Events. From here, you can edit, confirm, and cancel them.
Confirm an event
By confirming an event you indicate that you are sure it will take place and won't be canceled. We recommend doing it once you have reached the required number of attendees.
To confirm an event, open the list of Events from the top menu, find the event you need, and click on it to see the detailed information. You can confirm the event on the Event State tile:
If the event did not take place for some reason, you can change its state to Canceled. The information about canceled events will still be kept in the system.
You can read more about event confirmation in this article.
After an event
Your actions after the event is completed are basically the same as when you are working on events for a company or a brand.
For your convenience, we’ll go through available options here one more time.
Change participation status
WSB can save your time and handle the process of asking for evaluations and collecting them for you. These evaluations can later be turned into testimonials and shown on your website if you have one.
Once the event has been confirmed and finished, you can change attendees’ statuses to Participated for those who have taken part in your event.
You can do it by opening the event’s information from the Events menu and clicking on View on the Attendees tile. Here you will see that the current status of all attendees is Registered. After the event is confirmed, you can change it to Participated:
Those attendees who have been marked as Participated will start receiving follow-up emails if you have not turned this option off. And after some time, you will start receiving evaluations.
You can read more about why it’s important to change participation status and in what situations it changes automatically in this article.
Approve evaluations
Apart from changing the attendee’s status, you can also change the status of evaluations.
When an attendee submits an evaluation, it gets the Pending status until you approve or reject it.
After the evaluation is approved, an attendee receives an email informing them about it.
This article contains detailed instructions on how to approve evaluations manually. And if you want to automate this process, you can activate Automated Approval of Evaluations in the Account Settings - Settings.
Configure other settings
Above, we have gone through the main processes available to trainers in Workshop Butler. However, there are many additional settings that can make the event organisation even easier and expand the functionality you have.
Tip: if you are a licensed trainer, you have more options than partially-managed trainers. We recommend checking this guide to see all available features.
Team
It can be difficult to manage all events alone. Adding assistants who will help you could be a good idea. They will have the same rights as you except that they cannot delete you because you are the account owner.
You can manage your team from the Account Settings - Team tab in the General section on the left.
More detailed information about managing a team can be found in the Team Management articles in the Help Center.
Event language
In most cases, it would be better to cater to your audience’s language preferences. With WSB, you can choose a language for organisational processes, like the registration form or automated emails. It will make these processes more user-friendly and potentially can attract more visitors.
You can either choose to use the event's spoken language for all pages and emails or set one option from the 7 languages available. When the former is chosen, the language will change in accordance with the event settings. And with the latter, all pages will be in one language you have set.
You can read more about setting event languages in this article.
Form customisation
You might want to customise registration and evaluation forms we offer to request particular information from your attendees. Both options are available in the Account Settings - Event Management section.
You can find detailed information about customisation in the Evaluation & Registration Forms category in the Help Center.
Email customisation
WSB sends automated messages to attendees before and after an event. It’s possible to customise the content of these messages and send additional emails if there is a need to. For more information, check the Emails and Notifications category.
Slack, Mailchimp, and Zapier integrations
Integration with MailChimp and Slack can be useful to stay in touch with attendees and always be sure that attendees will be informed of the latest news. And integrating Zapier will give you access to apps and services it offers. Both options are available in the Account Settings - Integrations section on the left.
Website integration
With our website integration, you can keep your attendees informed about your schedule and promote upcoming events. See this article to learn more about options we offer and use cases.
Featured events
If you are using our website integration, you can highlight particular events to draw attention to them. For this, you need to activate the Featured events option in the Settings tab of the Account Settings.
Learn more with Help Center
Help Center contains a lot of useful information on different topics divided by categories. At the beginning of each article, there is a disclaimer indicating the target audience of this article - training company, trainer, or certification brand. Each of these three types has differences in functionality available to them hence the article will be useful only to the audience it was intended for. It also helps you understand if you can delegate a certain action to someone else (for example, trainers) who have access to the corresponding functionality.
If you have not found the answer to your question in the Help Center, you can always contact our support team. You can find the Contact button in the lower right corner of the screen when you are in Account Settings, Login Settings, or on Events Dashboard:
