Event planning and management

Live events and webinars are vital sales and marketing channels. But events and webinars can be complex to arrange, execute, and follow up on. The Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys event management feature helps you every step of the way, from initial planning and budgeting through promotion and publication, attendee registration, webinar broadcasting, final analytics, lead generation, and evaluation of ROI.

Key event-management features include:

  • Seamless contact, registration, and attendance management features in one system.
  • Business processes that guide users through the essential steps of event planning.
  • Session, session tracking, and speaker management.
  • Managing attendee passes to grant access to specific sessions or tracks.
  • Venue management for tracking buildings, rooms, and room layouts.
  • Guest logistics for registering hotels, room allocation, and reservations.
  • Tracking sponsors and their sponsorships for each event.
  • Creating Microsoft Teams webinars and live events.
  • Reviewing the attendance history of each contact, including events and sessions attended.

To create, view, and edit your events and all event-related records, go to the Events work area of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys, where you can create a new event and—working from this single event record—add most of the other types of records and information that you need to plan, publish, promote, and analyze it. Like many types of records in Dynamics 365, the event record provides a customizable business process workflow that helps guide you through each step of the process.

Use other parts of the Events work area to work with specific record types that relate to event planning, such as logistics, sessions, attendees, sponsors, and more. Depending on what you are doing at the time, you might access these types of records when working in the parent event record, or you could go to the area dedicated to a specific record type to work with that type of record only, or work across events.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys offers two solutions for event management: outbound marketing and real-time journeys.

When to use Customer Insights - Journeys and when to use outbound marketing for event management

Customer Insights - Journeys contains a subset of outbound event management features plus several improvements. The following table compares the Customer Insights - Journeys and outbound marketing event management features.

Feature Outbound marketing Customer Insights - Journeys
Single session event Yes Yes
Multi-session event Yes Yes
Session-level registration Yes Yes
Recurring event Yes Planned
Event level templates Yes Planned
Sessions, session tracks, speaker management Yes Yes
Venue management Yes Yes
Tracking sponsors Yes Yes
Creating Teams meetings/live events/webinars Yes Yes
Support for On24 and other generic webinar providers Yes Planned
Using marketing forms for registrations Yes Yes
Event portal landing page Yes Planned
Waitlist Yes Planned
Payments Yes Planned
Lead entity registration Yes Planned
Custom registration fields Yes Planned
Set registrations end date Yes Planned