Gavin
Founder: Swarm, StoryPrompt, Sendible
Waiting Rooms for Events 🚪
I walk through a new “waiting rooms” feature for events and show how it works from both the host and attendee sides. When I create an event, I can set “attendee arrival” to either admit people automatically into the live room or hold them in a waiting room until I’m ready to start.
Chapters
Transcript
Hey everyone, and welcome back to Swarm Bytes. So this month, we have quite a few updates around events, um, as well as a new tool to be able to move posts between different spaces or hubs. So I'm gonna start by showing you a new feature called waiting rooms. Now waiting rooms are where people attending events can then be held in a room before you're ready to welcome them into your live event. So I'm gonna show you how that works from both sides of the experience. OK, so when you go to create an event, you can do either live room or live stream. I'll just say test event. And you'll see at the bottom here, we've got something called attendee arrival, and you can choose between hold in waiting room or admit automatically. Now admit automatically means they will enter the room as soon as they join the event, they'll be in the live room with you. Hold-in waiting room means that they'll be held in a different room until you're ready to launch the event. So I'll show you how that works. So I'll click go live now. You can see that I've got a few different buttons here to start the event. I can view who's in the waiting room. I can end the event and I can obviously record the event when I'm ready to hit record. Now, as a member of the event, I can see obviously join live. I'll click join live as a member. You'll see that this member can now see they're in the waiting room and they'll be admitted to the event shortly and please wait here. Now we have this option for them to play a game while they wait. So everyone in the waiting room can play a game and they can compete against each other. The game is a simple clone of flappy birds called Beeline and um they can basically try to achieve their high score by navigating through the game and they'll obviously see other people in the waiting room and their scores. It's a great way to kind of create buzz before the event starts. So that's there while they wait. And now as the host, I can see there's one person waiting in the waiting room. I can obviously click, click to see who's in the waiting room. So Timothy Smith is in the room right now and I can then click start event. Right now, and I'll hit start events. And now, Timothy Smith is admitted straight into the, the room. So you can see I've got Timothy Smith and myself in the call, and that's how waiting rooms work. And now another new feature is as the host, you can also send everyone back to the waiting rooms. You can kind of go off-air, maybe you aren't ready to launch yet, click go off air, and then Timothy Smith goes back into the waiting room. And of course, you can just end the event when you're ready to end the event and that'll then take everyone out of the live call. The next feature I wanna show you is advanced recurring events. Now if you come into your events calendar and click add new events, and then if you go to future date, you'll see there's an option here to change the repeat to custom. When you choose custom, you've then got the option to repeat every 1 week, every 1 month, or every 1 year. If I go to every month, say every 2 months, I've then got the option here to say I want this to happen on the 1st Monday of the month, 2nd Monday, 3rd Monday, 4th Monday, or last Monday of the month. This will now repeat in a more smart way just like Google Calendar works. So you've got complete control over when the events repeat now. OK, the next feature is membership expiry dates. So if you have a product that expires, say after a few weeks, you can then have people's memberships automatically end at that date. So if I'm in my store and I go to pricing, I can add a pricing option here and I'll just say, let's say one time is$100. And I can say that this one ends after a set period. So they get access to this particular product. Uh, it might be a membership, it might be a course, whatever it is. But this then ends after 3 weeks, after purchase. So once they've paid, they get 3 weeks' access to that particular item, and then they get expired or kicked out of that, that product. Next up, we have the ability to move posts between hubs or spaces. So you know sometimes your members might post something in the wrong place or under the wrong topic. Well, you can now move their post to a different hub or space altogether. So here I've got a post under intros and let's Say I want this one to rather go into a different hub in my space, maybe called announcements. I can just click on the options here and move posts, and I can then choose which particular hub I want that to move to and obviously I could also move it to a different space altogether. So if you've got um, you know, some posts in the wrong place, you can now move it easily between different hubs and different spaces if you need to. That's it from me. See you next month. Cheers.