Creating an engaging and interactive experience for your students is an important part of the learning process, and with the Live Events feature you can create and manage events to connect with even more of your students!
In this article:
How Your Community Members Join Events
About This Feature
Your Community is a valuable tool for creating engagement and connection amongst your students. Live Events offers you a new way to utilize your Community to educate your audience - by giving you the power to schedule, organize, manage and display upcoming events!
Use Live Events for:
- Lectures
- Workshops
- Q&A
- Meet and Greets
- Breakout collaboration sessions
- Coaching
- ...and more!
How It Works
With the Live Events feature you can create, manage, and display events from directly within your Community. Learners can easily find and join upcoming events that are scheduled in the Events section of the Community page.
The Live Events feature is designed specifically for displaying and highlighting live event details to your learners. Each event includes an Image, Title, Description, Event Link, Date and Time.
A third party video conferencing tool is required to utilize this feature. You can use your preferred video conferencing tool (ex. Zoom) to host your live events and create event links.
Learners can easily see upcoming events within your Community and simply click 'Join' to launch the event link you've included!
Important Considerations
- You will require a third party video conferencing service (like Zoom) to run your live event. This feature does not currently support a direct integration with a video conferencing service.
- Some video services (Meet, Teams, Zoom, etc) may not support certain browsers or operating systems. Make sure to check with the video conferencing service of your choice for any limitations.
- In addition to all of the great features below, we're working hard to bring you more valuable features for future Live Events updates - like the ability to send notifications of upcoming Live Events to students, and tracking RSVPs. Read more about upcoming features.
How to Create an Event
Before creating a Live Event in Thinkific, you'll need to first create an event in a third party video conferencing service like Zoom and copy the event link.
- From your Thinkific Admin Dashboard, select Manage Learning Products
- Click Communities
- Open the Community that you want to create the event for, by clicking the ellipses (three dots) and selecting Go to Community
- From the left hand navigation menu, select Events
- Click the Create Event button
- Fill in the event details:
- Title
- Description
- Event type (online or in-person)
- Event link or location; you'll need to copy this from your third party video conferencing service
- Image
- The recommended aspect ratio for images is 16:9 (or 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high)
- Alt text
- Date
- Time
- Timezone
Note: Scheduling can currently only be done in 30 minute increments (for example, 4:30 to 5:00, 4:30 to 5:30, 6:00 to 9:00, etc)
- Click Create Event
Now your event has been created!
Once your event has begun, you will see a red notification on the event card with the word 'Live'.
Viewing and Editing an Event
Once you have created your event, it will appear on the Events page of your Community.
To Edit Your Event
- From your Community page, click Events on the left menu
- Click on the Event card to expand a side panel containing the image, title, location, description, and scheduling information for your event.
- To edit the details of the event, click Edit
- Once you have made your updates, click Update Event
Viewing Your Event
When viewing Events, you'll see Upcoming events by default. Once the scheduled date for an event has passed, the event will be visible under the Past tab of the Events page - you can still edit a past event from this tab if needed.
For example: You can update a previous event description to include a link to a recording of the event for reference!
How Your Community Members Join Events
To start the event you will need to login to your conferencing software of choice (e.g. Zoom) and begin the event from there.
To join an event, your Community members can simply click on the main event banner from the homepage to expand the right hand side panel options. From the right hand side panel, they will be able to select Join for any upcoming events within a 15 minute window.
A few important things to note about joining an upcoming event:
- The Join button will appear 15 minutes before the event start time, and will remain for the duration of the event. When clicked, the event link will open in a new window.
For example: if you've used Zoom, the Zoom link you pasted into your event will open in a new window.
- For in-person events, the Join button will not be included on your event listing.
Duplicating an Event
If you are hosting a regular event that is part of a repeated series, using the Duplicate Event feature will allow you to duplicate a previous event to easily fill out the event information!
To duplicate an event:
- From the Events page of your Communities section, select Past to view all of your past events:
- From your past events, find the event you would like to duplicate, and click on it.
- From the event side panel, select Edit.
- Scroll to the bottom of the event details, and select Duplicate.
Your duplicate event will be created in the same window automatically once you hit the Duplicate button. - Update the details for your duplicated event, including the name (which will be set as "copy of [event name]" by default), date, and time, and hit Create Event.
When creating a duplicated event, the event link (online events) or address (in-person events) from your previous event will be carried forward. If you do not want to use the same link or address for your duplicated event, you will need to manually change this in the event details.
Deleting an Event
If you need to delete an event, you can do so easily by following these steps:
- From the Events page of your Communities section, find the event you would like to delete
- Click on the event to expand a side panel containing the image, title, location, description, and scheduling information for your event
- Click Edit to edit the details of the event
- At the bottom of the event information, click the Delete Event button
- Select Delete Event on the popup to confirm
Frequently Asked Questions
Will I be able to see when an event is about to start?
Yes! Events in the Community space that are about to begin will say 'Starting soon' on the event card.
Is there a way to create recurring events?
Recurring events are not available currently, however one option to consider is updating a past event to a future date. If your event details are the same and you simply need to update the date to a future date, you can go to the Past tab of the Events page and edit your original event. This can help save some admin time when managing your events!
Is there a direct integration with Zoom or any other video conferencing tool for this feature?
There is currently no direct integration with a video conferencing tool for Community Live Events. This means you can use the video conferencing tool of choice to host your events.
You'll simply need to copy your event link to share in your Live Event within Thinkific! We have found that many of our creators have preferred services, and including a link provides you with the flexibility to choose a service that best suits your needs. Some popular options include:
Do you have recommendations for sharing event recordings with my students?
If you'd like your learners to have access to an event recording, you can update your event details to include a link to the recording.
To do this, go to the Past tab of the Events page, and edit your original event to include the link to the recorded event. Then, let your Community know that they can navigate to Past events to access those details!
Are you interested in learning more about what Communities has to offer? Thinkific is currently working on some updates to this feature, as part of our ongoing effort to make Communities a more integrative and immersive experience for you and your audience! To learn more about what we have in the works, check out our Communities Updates article!