Tip: only ask users for information you need

The information you need to collect about participants will vary depending on the event you’re running, and the nature of the participants’ involvement. For example, you are likely to want to a contact phone number for a speaker, but this doesn’t matter for your reviewers.

The danger is that you’ll either end up with too little information and have to collect it manually, or have too stringent information collection, putting off potential participants.

Fortunately, Expectnation provides you with a way of avoiding this dilemma.

User information disclosure

Whatever the nature of their interaction with your event—attendee, speaker, reviewer, etc—every user must register for an account with your Expectnation site. The information collected here can also be changed by the user at any time through their Dashboard.

Expectnation makes it possible to control user information collection through the “Disclosure” feature of the “Users” module. This feature is available in two places:

• at the top-level, which controls default disclosure settings, and
• per-event, allowing you to vary the default settings.

While some fields are considered basic essentials to Expectnation (name, email address and opt-in to further mailings) all the other fields can be in one of three states:

• not shown to the user,
• shown, but not required,
• required.

The screenshot below shows how this is controlled. You can simply click on the level concerned to cycle it through its available values.

The top-level information gathering settings for the User role is special, hence the darker line to the right-hand side in the grid. All participants are subject to these requirements, whatever else their role. For example, if you make the “Bio” field mandatory for users, you cannot loosen this requirement for attendees or other roles.

When a user takes on a new role (e.g. submitting a proposal will assign them the Proposer role) then Expectnation will ask them for any additional information that you require for this role.

Q&A

What if I increase the amount of information required after a user has registered?

Next time they log in, Expectnation will direct them to a page asking for the extra information.

What happens if I decrease the required information levels?

Expectnation will still store the information added previously, but it may not be shown to user if you prevent a relevant field from being shown in the user details form.

What’s the difference between top-level and per-event settings?

The top-level settings:

• control the global minimum information collection for all users, via the User role.
• set the defaults that will be applied to events that haven’t got customized disclosure levels

The per-event settings:

• allow loosening or tightening of default information disclosure levels
• are subject to the top-level User settings, and cannot loosen these