Overview

• Maintain a database of your people and email announcements to them.
• Design web pages where people can signup for events.
• Signup people for events or allow people to signup themselves.

Getting PRESTO

To begin using PRESTO, click on the Adopt PRESTO Now button on our home page and fill out the form. Doing this will create your very own PRESTO website on our web server. It is truly your website because its home page and other pages will only ever contain info related to your own group.

Your Role

You and the other people who manage your group are called administrators. When administrators login, they can access the full website. In particular, they can use the pages that enable one to create events and design signup pages.

Your Users

Everyone else can only see a part of the website. In particular, anyone can visit your group's home page, which lists your upcoming events. After a person logs in from here, she can also signup for events and see her current signups. Accordingly this page is also referred to as Self-Signup Home.

What PRESTO Provides

People Database

The people database is the online version of your contact list. More specifically, it contains everyone's registration info. For example, the email addresses stored there enable PRESTO to send out announcements on your behalf.

Only people in the database can login to your group's PRESTO website. (Note though, you can mark people as Inactive if you temporarily want to prevent them from logging in).

Changing the People Database

People get entered into the database in one of two ways — collectively via Import People or individually by filling out a registration form. Import People enables you to preserve your investmest in your existing contact list in one step. Simply create a tabbed text file containing: a row for each person and a column for each field that you want to import.

Registration form features:

• You can customize the Registration form of your group.
  • You can add fields, including fields only administrators can see. You can provide help for the fields you add. You can change the form's layout.
• You can register new people, update their contact info, and delete people.
• People can register themselves (if you choose to allow this), update their contact info, and update their password.
• A person can re-establish a password if she forgets her old one.

Other Database Features

You can search the people database and view the matches. You can also send an announcement to the people who match a search, or generate a report about them.

PRESTO can be setup to email someone about every change to the people database. You would do this if you wanted to continue using your non-PRESTO database as your master database.

Events and Event Templates

An event is the overall thing being planned at any give time — such as a sale, exhibit, or conference. You can create an event from scratch by telling PRESTO when it is, how long it lasts, what its signup schedule is, and so on.

Often though, you can use an existing event as a template for the new event you want to create. You can use one of your old events or you can use one of the sample events. When you use a template, its signup schedules and activities are all pulled over. All you have to do is enter a new start date. You can of course modify the event any way like after creating it.

A signup schedule is a rather specialized view of an event. If you want to give people who might signup (or visitors in general) the big picture, you should use the Make Event synopsis page. If you do, it is also pulled over when you use an event template.

Signup Schedules and Forms

A signup page contains your schedule, and buttons for signing up. When someone clicks on a button, a signup form is displayed. To do the signup, the user just has to fill in the form and click on OK.

There are actually two signup pages for an event. The admin-signup page can only be seen by administrators and can be used to signup anybody. The self-signup page, if you make it available, is used by others to signup themselves.

Designing a Signup Schedule

Making a signup schedule just means adding items to the schedule until you have identified everything you want PRESTO to put on the self-signup and admin-signup pages. A schedule item identifies the activity being signed up for, when it is, and how many people are needed then.

A PRESTO activity is the name for something you want people to do. Common uses include:

• A task you want volunteers for.
• A seminar you want people to attend.
• A questionnaire you want people to fill out.
• A contest you want people to enter, and possibly judges for the contest.

You can create both planning activities and on-site activities. A planning activity might be something that needs to occur well before the event, such as "Prepare Publicity". An on-site activity occurs during the event (or its setup or takedown), and is described by a start time and end time.

You can make signups be immediate or 2-step, meaning the signup action is a request and some administrator must accept or reject the request. You can also make an activity's presence in the self-signup page conditional. The activity's schedule lines will be shown only if the person's Roles field contains the activity's name.

Designing a Signup Form

For many events, you do not need to design a signup form. You can just use the default signup form, which includes only the person's name.

You can put any number of fields into a signup form. For each, you specify its name and data type, such as "number". You can also:

• Identify the field as either optional or required.
• Make it either public or admin-only.
• Provide help for it if desired.

You have control over the layout of the form. You can put multiple fields on a row, and you can move things around until you are satisfied with the look of the form.

Other Signup Features

These include the following.

• An administrator can name a signup schedule and associate multiple schedule names with a signup page. For example, at a conference you might want to have one schedule for volunteers and another one for attendees.
• An administrator can view signups per person and search/view historical signup info.
• An administrator can set and view signup status in various ways. For example, you can mark a planning activity as Behind or Done.
• People can edit a signup form after doing the signup if necessary.
• People can signup multi-person entities (see the Representing registration field).
• People can view a signup schedule in a variety of ways. For example, one can layout activities by date/time or alphabetically. More importantly, one can choose which schedule items to display. For example, one could show just the tennis courts available at a range of times on some date. This is of particular benefit to a mobile device user.

Email Automation

Announcements

You can email announcements. There are four aspects to the automation provided.

• You can include "variables" in a message, so that a personalized copy of the message is sent to each recipient.
• You can specify dynamic To-lists, such as all the people who have not signed up yet (e.g. for a followup volunteer solicitation).
• You can schedule a message or message series for later delivery.
• You can save messages in the Drafts folder and later call them up to edit or send them.

A typical usage of automation is an event-wide signup reminder. To do this, you would:

• Specify a To-list of: All the people who have signed up.
• Put a variable into the message that, for each recipient, expands to that recipient's signups.
• Save this message in the Drafts folder for use in a later event if desired.

Automatic Confirmations and Notifications

When a signup action occurs, you can have a confirmation message automatically sent. For example, the default confirmation message for a signup is: "Thank you for signing up. We have you down for: ... If you have any questions, please reply to this message or call ..."

You can customize the message that is used for each type of signup action. For an admin-signup, you can also choose to edit the message before it is sent out if desired.

You can also have the event staff sent a summary of each signup action.

Audit Trail

A summary of every announcement and automatic message is sent to the webmaster's email address. This gives you a complete record of the interactions of your group. For the odd case where a message gets lost, it also makes it easy to verify the message was sent and to send a repeat.

Report Generation

You can design, display, and print reports. Report columns can contain any signup info and registration info in your database, including your group's custom fields. Additionally, a column can be computed info. For example, if a signup form included an Hours_Worked field and an Hourly_Wage field, you could include a report column that contained Hours_Worked*Hourly_Wage.

When you design a report, you can also specify:

• The header text of each column.
• How rows of the report are sorted.
• How fields are formatted (e.g. left-aligned or right-aligned).
• How wide each field is.
• What if anything a footer row should contain. For example, you could make the footer cell of a numeric column be the sum of its rows.

There are 3 built-in reports you can use or customize as desired: sign-in sheets, address labels, and name-badge labels.

Online Access, Sharing, and Control

Benefits of a Web Application

Because PRESTO is a web application, people do not have to install any software to use PRESTO. Just tell a web browser your PRESTO home page and you are ready to go. Similarly PRESTO is completely portable. You can use it from any kind of system.

Because your group's data is online, you can access it from any computer you have access to, even if you are just borrowing one. This also means you and everyone else share access to the same up-to-date data. Finally we take care of backing up your data for you.

If your group has a general purpose website, you can link it to your PRESTO website. Conversely, you can setup links in the footer of each page of your PRESTO website. In particular, you can put an About-your-group link there.

The PRESTO User Forum

The forum enables people to participate in multi-person discussions in their group or across the entire PRESTO community. Using the forum is much like using email. The main difference is that a forum makes it easy to keep track of multiple large discussions at the same time.

The forum is also a searchable resource. You can get answers to PRESTO support questions and other issues of common interest. In particular, the PRESTO team:

• Provides reference material of general interest to the community.
• Insures that all significant PRESTO support questions get answered.

Application Interoperability

PRESTO makes it easy to interoperate with other applications:

• You can export your people database to a tabbed text file.
• Similarly you can set a report's layout to Raw Data to make it easy to cut and paste the report into another app, such as as spreadsheet.
• When you need more powerful filtering that PRESTO provides, you can export the unfiltered data, filter it, and feed the filtered data back into PRESTO. For example, you can generate a list of recipients into a file and send an announcement to them by simply telling PRESTO the file's name.

Access Control

• You can setup a password policy that is appropriate for how open you want your group to be.
• You can setup appropriate privilege levels for each user.

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