Travel and other events

Procedure for U3A Travel and other events.

The following procedure is primarily for Travel Trips but is also applicable to other events such as U3A Events.

The Organiser is therefore normally the Travel Trip Leader.

The Web Updater is normally Tom Stevenson @ web.update@u3ajavea.com

Webmasters are Peter deputy2.webmaster@u3ajavea.com and Margaret webmaster@u3ajavea.com

1. The Organiser will plan the event taking into account other events on the U3A Calendar.
2. As soon as the date has been decided the Organiser will provide at least the Event Title and date(s) to the Web Updater
3. The Web Updater will create a Calendar Event to reserve the date in the calendar. No Category at this stage
4. The Organiser will provide the publicity information to the Web Updater to complete the full event details. We need the details to grab member’s attention in between other emails and Social media etc so a few interesting and representative images should be included. The images should not be too small or they might look fuzzy when used. It is important that the Web Updater can extract the images from any supplied document. If the Organiser wishes to give the Web Updater an idea of the layout required that is fine, but it is not necessary or advisable to spend a lot of time creating a formatted document in PDF, Word or anything else because the information will have to be reformatted in HTML for the website and email to be viewable on both computers and phones. So just images and plain text are ideal. If payment by card only is allowed, the number of places to be can be limited using the inventory field.
5. The Web Updater will update the calendar event with all the details, add a line like “booking details to follow” and assign the Category Travel. There should be a suitable Extract for the event. The event will then be visible in the Travel Group webpage but not the front page.
6. The webmasters will create a suitable Jotform to record the initial bookings and payment request and also a Woocommerce Product to collect card payments. These will be linked in to the Event details together with the bank details for Bank transfer if required. The webmaster will send the links to the Booking form and the card payment form to the organiser in case these will be useful for dealing with member problems.
7. The Organiser will check that the details in the event and booking form are complete and correct.
8. When all this is ready and approved by the Organiser, the webmaster will add the Booking Form and the Bookable Events Category to the event. This will result in the event appearing in the Bookable Events section of the website.
9. At a suitable time the webmaster will update the published date of the event to current date/time. This will result in Mailpoet Post Notification sending the event to all of the Newsletters list
10. For each booking form completed, both the member who has booked and the Organiser, will receive an email with the details of each booking. The travel Organiser will also receive email notification of every card payment made. Additionally, all the submission information is available as a spreadsheet which can be accessed from a Google account or sent on request by the webmaster. This can be useful to easily get a list of emails for subsequent communication.
11. When the status of the event changes, e.g. fully booked, cancelled, revised dates etc, the Organiser will advise the webmaster promptly who will update the event where necessary e.g. apply Fully Booked” label and remove from Bookable Events, and block further card payments by setting the inventory to zero.

The above is applicable to a simple bookable event. The procedure is t.b.d. for those events that require a second e.g. final payment, or additional information such as passport details. Basically however this will be achieved using an additional Jotform,