Event Best practice in Sugar

[mcheatham]

I am hoping to get some feedback on the best way to handle a business process. My company does various roadshows where we ask attendees fill out a bucksilp so we can capture who was there and their info. We want to load this information into Sugar and associate that person with the event. One of the issues we face is the people signing up can be an existing client ie they are in either the Contants or Leads module.

So what is the best practice for loading in the new names and then associating them with an event? I thought about having the event be a campaign, but when I try to manually create a campaign and add targets to it from contacts, the campaign information does not show up in the contact's campaign sub panel for any of the contacts I added to the campaign.

Thanks,

[sugarcane]

Hello mcheatham,

when I try to manually create a campaign and add targets to it from contacts, the campaign information does not show up in the contact's campaign sub panel for any of the contacts I added to the campaign.

If you create a campaign of type other than email or newsletter, you will notice a button called 'Mark as Sent' at the top of the campaign detailview. When you create a target list and add Contacts/Leads to the target list, then, when you click on the 'Mark as Sent' button, a log item will appear in the Campaigns sub-panel in the Contact and Lead detailview.

[mcheatham]

Thanks, that solved the campaign issue. Any thoughts on whether these events should be logged as campaigns, notes, meetings etc?

[sugarcane]

Any thoughts on whether these events should be logged as campaigns, notes, meetings etc?

This really depends on what exactly you want to do with the data. If you just want to show for informational purposes that a contact or lead attended a trade show, then i think the campaigns module should be ok. If you actually want to track the status of a contact/lead in relation to the campaign, or keep track of the survey data in relation to the event, then it actually might be best to use another module. Depending on your needs, you could re-purpose an existing module or customize/create a new one to fit your needs.