Event management in Customer Insights – Journeys

Event management in Dynamics 365 can help you manage the many moving parts involved in planning, coordinating, executing, and following up on virtual or in-person events, including webinars and training sessions. Event management provides visibility into areas such as:

• Registration and attendance
• Speakers and sessions
• Attendee access levels
• Venues and rooms
• Sponsorships
• Guest logistics

Because the event data lives within Dynamics 365 CRM, you can connect existing contacts to event registrations, create new leads from event attendees, build marketing segments, use dynamic content in your messaging, and continue engaging with attendees after an event.

Creating a new event

To create an event in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, navigate to the Event planning area from the menu in the lower-left corner. The Events section displays your existing events and lets you switch between views or add filters and columns to customize how event information is displayed. When creating an event, start by entering information such as:

• Event name
• Event type
• Date and time
• Location, when applicable
• Other required or optional event details

Across the top of the event record, you’ll also see a business process flow. Like other areas of Dynamics 365 CRM, this workflow can be customized to reflect your organization’s event management process. Everything associated with the event can then be stored directly on the event record or connected through related records.

Building your event agenda and sessions

After entering your basic event details, you can use the Agenda tab to begin organizing your schedule. The calendar offers agenda, day, week, month, and year views. A session list lets you add individual sessions to your event. For a standalone webinar, your event might contain only one session. For a multi-day conference, however, you could use sessions to build out the full agenda across multiple days. When you create a session, it is automatically associated with the overall event. You can also add additional information such as:

• Session type
• Audience type
• Industry
• Session summary
• Other session details

Once saved, the session appears in both the session list and event calendar.

Adding speakers to a session

The Speaker Engagement area lets you associate speakers with individual sessions. You can select an existing speaker from your Dynamics 365 contacts or quickly create a new record. The resulting speaker engagement is associated with the session and can also be connected to the overall event. Dynamics 365 also provides fields for tracking costs associated with speaker engagements. More broadly, event records can help track high-level financial information such as speaker fees, venue costs, sponsorship income, and event pass or registration prices. Tracking event planning progress The event business process flow can help you monitor progress across the different stages of planning and executing your event. For example, you can track whether different tasks or stages are complete, in progress, not started, or simply not applicable to the event. Later stages can help organize marketing and promotional activities, final pre-event reminders, and post-event follow-up. Post-event activities might include:

• Thank-you emails
• Outstanding payments
• Lead follow-up
• Internal team debriefing

This makes the event record a central location for managing the event throughout its lifecycle rather than only during the registration period.

Managing venues and rooms

For in-person events, the Venue Management area provides additional tools for organizing physical locations. You can create records for buildings and store information such as:

• Location details
• Facilities
• Capacity
• Rental costs

Individual rooms can also be managed along with their specific features. Layouts provide another level of detail, allowing you to keep track of floor plans, usable space, and room capacity.

Managing event logistics

The Logistics area contains additional functionality for coordinating event vendors and accommodations. Event Vendor records can be used for organizations such as:

• Hotels
• Airlines
• Caterers
• Transportation providers

Hotel management functionality can also help track hotel partnerships, room allocations, and reservations, which can be especially useful when managing reserved room blocks for larger events.

Managing event sponsorships

The Sponsorship Management area lets you add and track sponsors associated with your events. List views can display information such as the event, sponsor account, sponsorship amount, and type of sponsorship. You can customize columns and filters to build views that make sense for the events your organization manages. Sponsorable articles can also be tracked, including branded items, giveaways, or other sponsored materials connected with the event.

Creating your event registration form

Once your general event information is configured, you can begin building the form attendees will use to register. From the event record, open the Website and form tab. Dynamics 365 provides a pre-built event registration form along with several hosting options. Depending on your needs, you can:

• Host the registration form on a standalone page with a unique URL
• Generate a JavaScript snippet to embed the form on an external website
• Connect the form to a Power Pages website
• Choose not to host it on a website

Event registration forms are managed from the event record rather than created through the standard real-time marketing form area. If you need to edit an event registration form, you should access it from the event where it is being used.

Finding your event registration forms

There is a useful workaround if you want easier access to your registration forms from your marketing forms list. You can adjust the list filters to display the Registration Form type and add the Marketing Form Type column. You can then save those settings as a custom view, giving you a convenient way to return to your event registration forms.

Customizing a registration form

When you open the default registration form, you’ll find basic fields along with dynamic content that can automatically populate details such as the event name and description. If you want to customize the default without affecting its use elsewhere, you can create a copy and edit that version for your event. For example, you might add:

• Company or organization name
• Marketing consent
• Other information your team needs for registration or follow-up

You should also consider what type of CRM records your registration process should create or update. Dynamics 365 provides settings that let you determine whether event registrations should capture leads. When your organization runs similar events regularly, thoughtfully designed default forms or reusable variations can make future registrations easier to configure. Keeping common fields and content reusable while leaving event-specific information dynamic can reduce repetitive setup.

Publishing your event registration form

Once you have added the fields you need, save and publish the registration form. You can then choose how attendees will access it, such as embedding the form on another website or generating a standalone registration page. Additional settings let you specify options such as whether to capture leads from event registrations and whether attendees should be allowed to register for multiple sessions. After your event goes live, Dynamics 365 provides a link to the registration page. Dynamic content on the form can automatically pull information such as the event name and description from the event record. You can continue editing the registration form even while it is live and being used for an event.

Reviewing registrations and submissions

Once attendees begin registering, you can review their submissions from the form’s Submissions tab. If the same form is used for multiple events, this area will display submissions across all events using that form. Creating event-specific forms can make this easier to manage when appropriate. As registrations accumulate, you also have the option to download the registrant information to Excel. Your registration data can then become part of the larger event outreach process, allowing you to send reminders before the event, follow up afterward, and continue engaging with attendees as leads or contacts.

What’s next

Creating the event and registration form establishes the foundation for the rest of your event marketing strategy. In part two of this series, we’ll build marketing emails for different stages of the event and use conditional content to personalize those messages. Part three will explore event registration triggers and customer journeys to help automate event outreach from registration through follow-up.