PDF Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes
I thought that I’d spend a little time this month talking about the Special Event field that currently exists in PD Place’s in-service detail screen. Though not the software’s most commonly-used feature, the Special Event field does provide some very useful reporting and search capabilities that may just fit for your organization. Here are a few ways you can make use of the Special Event field:
- The Special Event field is controlled through two Course Preferences: “Special Event Label” allows you to specify your own unique label for this field (e.g. PD Day), and “Special Event Show” allows you to enable or disable the displaying the field.
- There’s a report available to supervisors called “Email Attendee List” which is unique to the Special Event field. This report lists all registrants for in-services associated with a specific event name and lists user IDs, attendees’ first and last names, email addresses, site/location, in-service ID and in-service title. Additionally, PD Place automatically emails whoever runs the report, the same information in a tab delimited text file. This text file can then be imported into Excel, or a similar product, so the data can be manipulated or sorted as required. The Special Event field is also available as a filter on the advanced in-service search screen.
- Within each in-service, the Special Event field is displayed as a free formatted text field. Here you can enter unique identifiers that can be used to group your in-services to meet your requirements. For example, you may have a group of five in-services and everyone in your organization must register for two. Using the same special event name for all of these in-services will allow you to export a list of registrants which you can then manipulate to determine who has or has not registered for their two in-services. The searching capability can also be exported to provide your users with a quick way of finding these five in-services and register for them.
As you can see, the Special Event field is a handy tool that, with a little planning and thought, can be manipulated to satisfy a number of unique situations.
