Communities: Live Events

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!

About This Feature

Your Community is a valuable tool for creating engagement and connection among 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 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 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 — 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
Optional: Select Send Email to email all members who have notifications enabled about the new 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
Optional: Select Send Email to email members who have already expressed interest in the event about the event detail changes

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!

Notifying Members and Sharing an Event

When creating a new Live Event, you will be prompted and given the option to send a notification email to all your Community members who have notifications turned on. Members who have opted out of receiving notifications will not receive an event email.

Sending Live Event emails allows you to garner attention and interest in your Community and is highly recommended when creating, updating, or canceling an event. This ensures that you keep your members informed and up-to-date. At this time, email copy can't be edited, however, the title, description, location, image, and date of your event are auto-populated and can be customized through your event details.

Members who are interested can access your event page by clicking on the View Event CTA link in the notification email before confirming their interest. The Event RSVP feature allows you to easily understand how many people are interested and what topics drive engagement in your community.

If you need to update or cancel an upcoming event, you will also be prompted and given the option to send a notification to your Community members who have already expressed interest in your initial event. This follows transactional email guidelines and ensures members have information directly applicable to the service you're providing.

The event page is a standalone page, making it easy for both you and your community members to copy the URL and share it with a wider audience. The event page can be accessed through the notification email or through your Community Event page by selecting the desired event and clicking the event title. Members will have to be logged in to view the standalone page.

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.
Optional: Select Send Email to email all members who have notifications enabled about the new 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
Optional: SelectSend Email to email members who have already expressed interest in the event about the canceled event

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!