How to Soft Launch an Event Follow

You might want to allow your exhibitors or speakers into the event platform before the attendees -- Pathable would call this a soft launch. Here are the steps to take:

Launch (but don't tell anyone)

1. Prepare your site by ensuring that the people you want to invite in have the appropriate permissions.
   • Speakers are imported and attached to their sessions
   • Organizations have staff members assigned to them
2. On the Home tab, click the Launch button, and disable the invitation and both message toggles, as shown below, then select Launch.

Now, you can select the people who should be invited into the event! 

Invite Select Individuals

1. Select Communications > Campaign.
2. Choose Add from Template, locate "Organization Staff Invitation" (assuming you are inviting organization staff members), and select USE TEMPLATE button on the far-right of the message.
3. Verify the text of your message -- don't remove the tokens, though!  They send valuable access links to your organization staff so that they can log in.
4. Select Select Audience button.
5. Select the orange drop-down that reads "Everyone,' and change to "Everyone who is staff of an organization," as shown below:
6. Once the filter shows the list of recipients, select Schedule.
7. Choose to Send Now, or Send Later at a time and frequency of your choice.

Note: You can do the same process to early-invite your speakers, too -- create a Template to send to them in the Communications Template menu, and send that to the "All Speakers" audience.

Later, Invite Everyone Else

Once it's time to invite everyone else into the app:

1. Select Communications > Campaign.
2. Choose Add from Template, locate "Attendee Invitation" (assuming you are inviting organization staff members), and select USE TEMPLATE button on the far-right of the message.
3. Verify the text of your message -- don't remove the tokens!
4. Select Select Audience button.
5. Select the orange drop-down that reads "Everyone," and change to "All users who have never responded."

Note: These steps assume that you have already imported your attendees. You can also use this entire process without importing the regular attendees first. If you prefer to import the attendees after you've launched, and invite them at the same time, you can do that too.