Tracking event attendance in Banner, Part 2

In Part 1, I showed you the data-entry side of the system – setting up new events and adding database constituents as RSVPs and/or attendees. Today I’ll show you how to access counts of RSVPs and attendees, right in Banner.

Let’s say you’re working at the registration desk for your annual on-campus alumni reunion event, and your Alumni Director or someone comes up and asks for an update on how many attendees have registered so far. You can provide him or her with up-to-the-minute numbers in a cinch. Here’s what you do.

Go directly to GEIATTD. This screen will allow you to view and count all IDs who attended an Event or any specific Function within an Event. This is a query form – you can’t change attendance information here.

If you’ve been signing people in, the first two fields in this screen should already be populated with the unique number (CRN) and description of the event. If not, just click on Search (down arrow beside the Event field) to call up SLQEVNT, and press F8 to populate the query table; double-click on the desired event and return to GEIATTD.

You’ve got several options for counting up your attendees. But first, a couple of notes:

• If a person is registered for more than one function, their ID will be listed twice on this screen, but the ID will be counted only once, so you don’t have to worry about double-counting.
• Non-constituent guests (noted in comment fields) cannot be counted.

The following options assume that the buttons “No Guest Criteria” (Guest Indicator area) and “Both” (Invitee/Guest Indicator area) are selected. This follows from the fact that I don’t use the guest registration features in Banner. If you decide to use them, make adjustments accordingly.

1. To count both RSVPs and attendees together:

• Leave Function blank
• Leave RSVP blank
• Select “No Attendance Criteria”
• Click in any field of the box below.
• View number in the box “Count”, top right.

2. To count only attendees:

• Same as above, but instead select “Attended” instead of “No Attendance Criteria”

3. To count RSVPs:

• Same as (1), but double-click in RSVP field and choose the appropriate code (eg. “Attend”).

4. To count RSVPs or attendees for a specific function:

• Fill in the desired Function in the Function field, using the search icon.
• Fill in other fields as desired.

This screen is perfect for obtaining quick RSVP/attendee counts on the fly. Naturally, though, you’ll want to have some reporting options in place in order to make full use of the Event Module for attendance tracking.