Calendar invitations

This article is for training companies and trainers.

When announcing an event you need to make sure that those who registered won’t forget about its start. 

Workshop Butler supports the Calendar Invitations option allowing attendees to mark event dates and location (or meeting links) in their calendars. 

Date and time

After a person registers for an event, they receive an automated welcome email that includes one or several files in the .ics format. This format contains information about date and time and is recognised by calendar apps like Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and others.

If the email service provider allows it, the event dates will be rendered directly in the email body along with the button to add them to the calendar:

If the email provider does not support such an option, an attendee has to download .ics files attached to the email and open them to add to the calendar:

The calendar invitations work differently depending on the duration of an event and the number of sessions.

• 1-day event:

  The event is added to the calendar on the relevant date with start and end times.

• Event for 5 or less days created without the Multiple Sessions option

  The event is added to the calendar on the relevant dates as an all-day event, without start and end times.

• Multi-session event:

  The invitation contains the dates for all sessions that are added to the calendar along with start and end times.

For the events that last more than 5 days and have been created without the Multiple Sessions option, the calendar invitation is not included in the Welcome email. As the Multiple Sessions option has been added just recently, all events created before were added like one event spanning for many days. Adding such a long event to an attendee's calendar can be confusing for them. Thus, we have decided to turn off calendar invitations for long events. It's a temporary measure and we plan to change it in the future.

Thus, if you are planning a long event that will last several days, we recommend considering adding multiple sessions as it will allow your future attendees to add them to their calendars.

Address and meeting links

Calendar invitations to in-person events include the address you can specify when adding an event. For online events, the location can be displayed too (e.g. city or country).

Or, if your event takes place online, you can include a link to the meeting when adding an event:

In this case, the link will be added as an event location to the calendar invitation: