How to Create an Event Registration System with Auto-sent Calendar Invites

Let's say you're planning an upcoming event and you want an easy way to collect event registrations and also have attendees receive a Google Calendar invite with the details that they need to know about the event. There are third party tools that one could use, say, for example, Meetup. But let's say you don't want to go that route, and you don't want to just have a simple form that collects the registration information without giving something in return to your event attendees. If that's the case, this setup might work for you. So we're using a couple of common NoCode tools.

The first is Tally. The next is Integromat. And the next is Google Calendar.

What I've done before this video is there's a couple of setup tasks that I've done. One is I've created this generic registration form in Tally. It collects a person's name, their email address. They can select which events they plan to attend. They can pick one or more.

In Google Calendar, I've created a specialty events calendar, which is got events in the name, but you could use your default calendar or create something special depending upon what your individual needs are. And on that calendar, I've added four events that correspond to the dates that are on my form.

And for each of these events, a few customization options that I've done. One is I've turned off common guest permissions because I don't want people to see the email addresses for other people coming to the event. And I also don't want attendees to modify the event or to invite others without my knowledge. But maybe you might want to leave, invite others enabled for your particular situation. I also made sure that this Google Meet conferencing was disabled.

And that's kind of basically it for each of the individual events.

Okay, so now we've kind of talked a little bit about what's already been set up. Let's start building this out. So going back to my event registration form, as I said, we've got name, contact info, several dates to choose from. I haven't yet published that, so let's go ahead and publish the form. And that gives us a URL, which we're going to save in another tab.

And the next step is we're going to start integrating or connecting Tally with Integromat. So we're going to go to integrations here, not to be confused with Integromat. So after we go to integrations, we can now click on this option to connect with Integromat. And if you haven't gone through this process before, some of the documentation that's up there is a little confusing. So hopefully this will help you.

You're going to create a new scenario. You're going to be on this canvas here. You're going to click the big plus button. There's a number of third party services here. And so we're going to search for Tally.

This is the Tally logo and name. So we're going to click that. And in our case, our trigger is going to be whenever there's a form submission. So that's what this is saying. We're going to watch for new responses.

It's instantaneous, so we're going to say, Yep, we want to do that. And then if I'd already had Tally and Integrate connected, I'd have some options here, but I don't. So we're going to click Add and we're going to say still kind of generic, but a little bit more specific than what had been there. And we're going to click Add again. And connection name is my Tally connection.

That works. Say Continue. We're going to have a pop up here. All right, so now we're almost there. Okay, so we've got the screen here.

We're going to accept and allow data to go back and forth between Tally and Integromat. I'm going to say Accept, waiting for authorization, verifying connection. Okay, so we've got Tally webhook response. This is now populated with my Tally connection. And now the next thing we need to do is form ID.

Really? It's not an identifier. It's going to go in with the name of the form and ours was this generic registration form. So I fill that in, I'm going to click Save, and it's populated with our Tally Webhook response and we're going to say, okay, and that's it. We now have Tally and Integromat connected, but that's only one small piece of this workflow.

Ultimately, we want this data to end up on our Google Calendar. So to do that, we're going to add another module. We're going to search for Google Calendar.

There's Google Calendar. And in our particular case, what we're going to be doing is updating an event. Because remember, we've already created the events. So we don't need to create, we just need to update. So we're going to say update an event and I need to add a connection.

Let's say continue, I have a pop up and now I'm going to allow Integromat Matt to talk to Google.

Okay, alright. So they're now connected and talking to one another, but I need to give a little bit more info. And the next thing, the first thing is the Calendar ID, which calendar should be connected. So if I go back over here, if I click on the three dots for my particular calendar, I get settings and sharing. And if I scroll down, I have this option, integrate Calendar.

So I'm going to take that and I'm going to go back to Calendar ID and paste that in. And then the next thing is my event ID. Which event should data be added to?

One might think if I opened up this calendar event and I'm going to drop the tab down a little bit so that you can see the URL, one might think that the event ID is this value here. That's not entirely accurate. We still need this value. So I'm going to copy it, I'm going to delete this. What we really need to do is we need to decode that value.

And so I'm going to do that by going to base 64 decode.org. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste in that value that I got, press decode. And there's two values here. See, there's a space between the two. I want the first value, everything up until the space.

So I'm going to copy that and go back over here to Integromat paste in the event ID.

So that now as data comes in, we're going to look at this calendar and we're going to look at this event ID. And now what is it that we want to do? Well, we want to append attendees, so we've checked that, but that's not all. But there's some other stuff that we want to do, too. So we need to show advanced settings, and that gives us some more things.

And so for attendees, we're going to click on that.

Actually, we haven't filled in the form at all, so we don't necessarily have data yet. So let's cancel that and let's say, okay, and let's save this and let's go back to our form and put in some data.

Okay, so let's and if you don't know, that's tricky add plus and then some content, it's going to get ignored by Google, but is good for understanding and tying your testing scenarios. So we're just going to call this generic data input. We'll say, February 9, send me invites. So we've sent some data. And if I go back over here to Integromat Matt, let's run this once so that we've got some data to work with.

Okay, now let's go back to configuring what we want to happen, how we want to pass data to Google Calendar.

All right, so attendees, so now you can see we've got some data to work with. So for name, we're going to say name and contact contact info. For email, we're going to say email address, we're going to say add.

All right? And so send notifications about event creation. We need to do that. I'm going to say to everyone, doesn't matter whether or not yeah, I just want it to go to everybody, and I'm going to say, okay, I'm going to save this.

Okay, let's go back to our form and let's run it again and do a test and see if we're adding people we're adding to our calendar. So if I go back and look at my calendar for February 9, if I edit it, we'll see that there's currently no guests.

Okay, going to be our first test.

Send me an invite. Okay, my registration is done. I go back over to Integromat Mat. I run this process existing. Okay, so it looks like some level of action took place.

I'm noticing on my second screen that I received a calendar invite.

So here is my calendar invite that was sent to Colleen at test one. My guest list has been hidden.

If I go and look at my calendar. Let's open that up again. We'll see that we've got one guest and it is this test one at Iheart no code. Okay, that's great. So we have a successful first scenario with our form.

Great scenario if you just have one event. But in this particular case, we've got multiple events. So we need to make some modifications to our workflow to handle that.

The way that we're going to do that is we're going to add an iterator and a router.

And we're going to also add this little Google Calendar module, one for each actual event that's taking place. And this is why this particular setup isn't going to be great if you've got a lot of events taking place, because it's going to be a little bit of work to configure and test and make sure that everything's okay. If you're just kind of having some events here and there, this scenario will can work for you. Work for you. So let's start modifying the workflow.

So we're going to press this and we are going to add a module. And the module that we want to add is an iterator, which is actually a flow control. And we want this one here, not the array aggregator.

Okay? So now we need to specify what our array is, whether that is where there is multiple events. And so because we've got some form data that's been submitted, we can kind of see some of that. And so if we hover over this, you can see that it says dates you plan to attend and then the word array. So that's what we want.

We don't want like this next option because that says a Boolean. So Boolean meaning it's either a true or false situation, which is going to be important in just a minute. So dates I plan to attend. So we're going to click on that. And so that's our flow control.

So we're going to click. Okay. And then the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to add a router.

Let's move this over a little bit. And then as part of this router, if we right click here, there's this option to set up a filter. And so that's exactly what we want to do. Depending upon what the form said, you either continue on or you don't continue on. So let's take a look at what that looks like and dive into that a little bit more.

So I'm going to say set up a filter. And I am going to label this February 9. And my condition is going to be dates I plan to attend.

And then if I click here, there's a number of various operators. It's important for our situation to scroll down. And we're going to look for Boolean. So Boolean operators equal to and what we want to say, because this was a Boolean. See where it says boolean?

If this is true, that's what we want now let me just see what's our case? Yeah, okay. Equal to true. Okay, move that there.

And then I'm going to clone this, set up a filter, say date. I plan to attend February 10.

Equal to we want the boolean option equal to true.

And then we need to configure this. So calendar ID is going to stay the same, but the event ID is going to be slightly different because it's a different date. So if I go back for February 10, going to grab from the URL that is NID, I'm going to take that, go back over to base 64, decode.org and enter that in going to say decode, grab this new value, make sure that I get this right.

And basically I'm going to be repeating those steps again for the 11th, twelve, 12th and 13th.

Okay. Have set up for the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th. So for each of our calendar, 910, 1112, we have turned this on, we have saved it. And so now it's going to be a matter of testing. I should also mention before we start testing that there is an option when you are adding as part of your filtering that you can do a fallback route.

I am not doing this here, but that could be a good practice, especially if you are updating this form periodically with other events. Maybe you'll just in case you were to forget an event or something, you don't want to have kind of like a dangling, like to borrow from English grammar, a dangling participle situation. So this fallback route can be helpful in that case.

But we're going to delete that module. All right, so as I said, we've got everything saved. We've turned this on.

Let's testing.

So we had been testing February 9, let's try the 10th. So only the and so I see in my email that I have gotten an invite for the 10th. So if we go take a look here, I see a ten there. If I go and look at the 9th, I see that earlier test, no attendees for the 11th, no attendees for the 12th.

And if I bring this over here, is that event for the 10th. Close that down. So let's now check the 11th.

And I see over in my email that I have gotten an invite for the 11th. I come back over here to my calendar. So the 9th still has one person, the 10th has one person, the 11th has a person. And that is showing now that Colleen at eleven and the 12th doesn't have anybody.

Let's refresh this now. Let's check the final or not the final than near to final situation. So February 12, send me invites. So could there be an error?

Let's take a look.

Go back.

So this is our second attempt at twelve B.

Okay, so I did just receive an email for twelve B, but I'm not sure what happened to the original 12th. So I'll look at that offline, but the situation appears to be working. Should be worth double checking a little bit more. So let's now check with multiple.

So we're going to say February 9, February 11. Send me invites, and I see in my email that I have a February 9 and a February 11. If I go over here, I see that.

Test one calling at multiple. And if I look at this, I have Colleen 1112 B I did not update.

So I do need to go back to number twelve. But these other situations are working. So calling out multiple and so that's a wrap for showing how to use Tally plus Integromat plus Google Calendar as a way of collecting event registrations on your website and having attendees receive a Google Calendar invite so that information is easily on their calendar. If you use this tutorial in some way, please let me know. We'd like to know how you ended up using it and what modifications you make.

Thank you for watching.

Happy Building. Bye.

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