Event planning and management
Note
On September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights began to be sold together under a single product SKU called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. The individual applications have been renamed Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data, respectively. For more information, see Dynamics 365 Customer Insights FAQs
Starting on September 1, 2023, new Customer Insights - Journeys customers receive real-time journeys features only. For more information, see Default real-time journeys installation. Many documentation pages currently refer to outbound features that may not be available or may work differently in real-time journeys. The documentation content is being updated to note whether it applies to real-time journeys or outbound marketing.
Important
To use event management in the real-time journeys area of Customer Insights - Journeys, you must enable the feature switch. To enable the feature switch:
- Go to Settings > Overview > Feature switches.
- Enable the Enable events creation in real-time journeys feature switch toggle.
Live events and webinars are a vital sales and marketing channel. But events and webinars can be complex to arrange, execute, and follow up on. The Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys event management feature helps you every step of the way, from initial planning and budgeting through promotion and publication, attendee registration, webinar broadcasting, final analytics, lead generation, and evaluation of ROI.
Key event-management features include:
- Seamless contact, registration, and attendance management features in one system.
- Business processes that guide users through the essential steps of event planning.
- Session, session track, and speaker management.
- Managing attendee passes to grant access to specific sessions or tracks.
- Venue management for tracking buildings, rooms, and room layouts.
- Guest logistics for registering hotels, room allocation, and reservations.
- Tracking sponsors and their sponsorships for each event.
- Creating Microsoft Teams webinars and live events.
- Reviewing the attendance history of each contact, including events and sessions attended.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Voice survey integration.
- A fully functioning event website you can publish that includes:
- Self-service attendee registration.
- Important details about all published events, including event name, venue, passes, session schedule, and speakers.
- All information drawn directly from your Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys event-planning records, with updates automatically reflected on the event website.
To create, view, and edit your events and all event-related records, go to the Events work area of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys, where you can create a new event and—working from this single event record—add most of the other types of records and information that you need to plan, publish, promote, and analyze it. Like many types of records in Dynamics 365, the event record provides a customizable business process workflow that helps guide you through each step of the process.
Use other parts of the Events work area to work with specific record types that relate to event planning, such as logistics, sessions, attendees, sponsors, and more. Depending on what you are doing at the time, you might access these types of records when working in the parent event record, or you could go to the area dedicated to a specific record type to work with that type of record only, or work across events.
After your event, session, track, speaker, and pass records are all in place for an event, you are ready to publish it on the event website, where attendees can read about the event and register for it. You must also publish each related session and track that you want to show on the website for each event. More information: Publish events, sessions, tracks, and related records to the website
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys offers two solutions for Event Management: outbound and Customer Insights - Journeys.
Note
If you have created a Portal hosted event website, you must manually overwrite your sample website with the latest version to maintain functionality after applying any Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys update.
If your event website is self-hosted, you must install the latest self-hosted sample website to maintain functionality after applying any Customer Insights - Journeys update.
When to use Customer Insights - Journeys and when to use outbound marketing for event management
Customer Insights - Journeys contains a subset of outbound event management features plus several improvements. The following table compares the Customer Insights - Journeys and outbound marketing event management features.
| Feature | Outbound marketing | Customer Insights - Journeys |
|---|---|---|
| Single session event | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-session event | Yes | Planned |
| Recurring event | Yes | Planned |
| Event level templates | Yes | Planned |
| Sessions, session tracks, speaker management | Yes | Yes |
| Venue management | Yes | Yes |
| Tracking sponsors | Yes | Yes |
| Creating Teams meetings/live events/webinars | Yes | Yes |
| Support for On24 and other generic webinar providers | Yes | Planned |
| Using marketing forms for registrations | Yes | Yes |
| Waitlist | Yes | Planned |
| Payments | Yes | Planned |
| Lead entity registration | Yes | Planned |
| Set registrations end date | Yes | Planned |