Advanced form setups: Collecting information from a selected group of accepted speakers

While Sessionize allows you to create a fully usable Call for Speakers form in minutes, you can easily set up a more elaborate form to collect important and useful data from your speakers. The CfS form consists of three groups of fields; learn all about them in the following article: Custom fields explained: Submission, Additional and Internal fields.

In this article, we'll dive into one of the more advanced CfS form configurations, where you're utilizing the aforementioned fields, conditional logic, and other customization options to collect information from a selected group of accepted speakers.

Here are some of the scenarios where that can be very useful:

• You want to collect expense details exclusively from those speakers whose costs you're covering
• You want to find out if speakers doing workshops have any special technical requirements
• You need flight numbers from speakers who aren't local 

Form setup

We'll use a real-life example to make the setup process as clear as possible. Let's say you want to cover travel expenses for some of your accepted speakers. If that's the case, you'll want to know the travel details for such speakers, i.e. their chosen means of travel, ticket number, and the total cost of their trip. If you're not covering everyone's travel expenses, it makes little sense to ask all speakers about their travel arrangements, because that would result in irrelevant data and potential confusion.

Sessionize lets you tackle this issue by creating the necessary fields and tying them together with conditional logic. That way, travel-related questions will only appear if an organizer specifically declares that the speaker has to provide additional information about his participation in the event. Here's how you'd go about setting that up.

On the Edit event page, open the Additional fields tab and look for the Speaker fields section on the right. First, you want to add a somewhat vague single-choice question, which only you, the event organizer, can edit. The purpose of this field is to give you a way of selecting which speakers have to submit more information – those are the ones whose travel expenses you're covering, in our example. Click the blue Add new field button and select Add single choice category.

The question/title of that field is entirely up to you. A general “More info needed” will do just fine. It's a good idea to opt for a vague title that looks completely inconspicuous to your speakers. If you were to go with a more direct title, such as “Travel expenses info needed”, some speakers might wonder why they aren't getting their expenses covered.

Make sure to configure the field as Optional, and enter the options to choose from. In this example, you can safely use a single option: Yes.

Now you want to prevent speakers from altering this field. Simply click on the cog wheel next to that field and click Do not allow speaker to edit the answer. That's it, the first field is done!

Next, let's create three additional fields, that speakers will use to provide you with the necessary information. In our example, we're starting by asking about their chosen means of travel. You'll find that out by creating a multiple-choice field. Click the blue Add new field button and select the Add multiple choice category option. Name it whatever you find the most appropriate and set it up as Required. Then enter the options that speakers will be able to choose from.

Then create a short text field that speakers can use to enter their ticket number. Click the blue Add new field button and select the Add short text field option. Name it “Ticket number” and configure it as Required.

Finally, ask the selected speakers to state their travel expenses. Click the blue Add new field button and select the Add integer field option. Configure it as Required. You can cleverly use the Enter additional description (optional) box to tell the speakers what currency to use.

Finally, you want to make all three fields conditional. Meaning, they'll only pop up if you've selected “Yes” in the first field. Click the cogwheel next to the second field and select Conditional logic. 

Configure it to show up only if the previous field has the value “Yes” and confirm by clicking Update. Repeat the process for the remaining two additional fields.

Wrap everything up by sending a message to your speakers, asking them to fill out the form where you're asking them for additional information. This can be done on the Group mailing page by creating a new mailing. Learn about the inner workings of our Group mailing feature in the following article: Group mailing keeps your speakers up to date and helps you collect additional data. Refer to the screenshot above to find out how to properly set up the group mailing for our specific example. 

A quick overview

Here's a summary of what we've done in this article.

• We created a single-choice speaker field that organizers can use to select which speakers have to provide additional data
• We locked that field from editing by speakers
• We added three fields where selected speakers must enter their travel information
• We configured these additional fields to become visible to speakers only if we select “Yes” in the first field
• We created a group mailing to request that the qualifying speakers fill out the travel information