Ability to make Candidate Attending optional on Event Registrations

I would like a way to make the "candidate attending" portion of an event registration form optional. We have a lot of parent-only events, and we worry that having to include that checkbox will cause confusion, and result in children coming to parent-only events.

  • Erica Bryant
  • Aug 23 2016
  • Implemented
  • Attach files
  • Sarah Bienvenue commented
    11 Oct, 2022 05:48pm

    The new event registration experience is now live!

  • Brian LeBlanc commented
    24 Feb, 2022 02:22pm

    It would be great if we could get this removed as a required option. As with others, our events are intended to be for parents only, and being unable to remove this option makes it very difficult to use event management without significant confusion.

  • Geoffrey Goodfellow commented
    15 Oct, 2021 02:38am

    In addition, we also have the opposite problem where we want to host shadow days for the candidates only without parents. Event forms don't allow you to specify a limited number of candidates unless you also allow parents to attend.

  • Lauren Dennis commented
    28 Oct, 2020 07:25pm

    This, and especially in an era of COVID and online-only events (we're not hosting any in-person events) it really distorts our data. We don't take guest counts for online events and the families think we need to know if the student will be in front of the computer. Unchecking the box drops the family off the list on the Home screen entirely, and it's not a relevant data point for online events to know if the student herself is present or not.

  • Jay Falk commented
    24 Sep, 2019 10:48pm

    We have parent-only events and this messes with the quota numbers.  It adds an attendee that won't be coming!  We need to label this field somehow that gets the user to UN-CHECK the box.  Blackbaud has some convoluted interfaces, but this takes the cake.

  • Nathalie Miller commented
    15 Dec, 2016 01:23am

    I found it simple to change the field names for the Candidate data to Applicant's First Name, etc. In the introductory paragraph of the Event Registration I make it very clear that it's an Adult Only event. I have now tied all our Admissions Tours, Events, and Play Dates to our Checklists and so far, so good!  I agree that it would be great if the Candidate Attending checkbox was optional or avoidable.

  • Guest commented
    29 Aug, 2016 04:44pm

    Yes.  The "candidate attending" check box is the only reason we can't use this form.  I want to integrate the event registration with the checklists and not have the candidate attend certain events.  This will be fine for evaluations on campus, but not for tours where we don't want the kids attending.  Allowing a platform manager access to decide whether or not this field is required seems like an extremely simply fix on Blackbaud's end. 

  • Ash Smelkinson commented
    24 Aug, 2016 03:25pm

     The other issue is that on the old registration form they used of “Registrant Fields”, and they now have “Candidate Fields." This means that if a parent is signed in, the form populates with the candidate’s name and not the parent’s. We've had problems setting up events so that they're tied to the checklist to begin with as well. I don't know if it works for anyone else- this was something that I was so excited about and will make registration so much easier, but we've been waiting since the release for this tool to be functional.