Change Order Of Event Speakers On Invitation Emails In Customer Insights Journeys

If you have used the Event Management functionality in Customer Insights – Journeys, you may have also set up sessions. Sessions can also be linked to Speakers, creating Speaker Engagement records showing which Speaker is presenting on which Session. This information can then be displayed on your Invitation emails, thank you for registering and reminder emails as part of Event Journeys. Awesome! But you could run in to challenges in terms of what actually gets shown on those emails. In this post we will walk through how you can make sure your Speakers only show once in the list, and show in an order you determine.

It’s good to understand where you can pull the Speakers from. On an email, you can create a list. You could do this from one of the triggers, or directly from an Event you select by using the Other tables section like you see below.

From the Event, your natural instincts might be to then go to the Speakers table. Why wouldn’t you? Well, the Speakers are not linked directly to the Event, they are linked via the Speaker Engagement Table. So ignore that table for now.

Instead, we need to go from the Event, to the Speaker Engagement table then from there to the Speaker table. This means we get all linked Speaker Engagement records for the Event and can pull information about the individual Speakers linked. Here you can see all of the fields I am pulling in.

If you want to test it and set an Event directly from a specific record you can do that using the Other tables option, otherwise you would use the trigger and can add in an Event for your testing purposes.

You can then format the List any way you choose. For more information on how to do that, you can review this post showing how to format the list of speaker profiles for an event including how to display their profile photo.

When you preview the email (making sure you have linked to an Event for testing) you can see two glaring issues. One is that some people are shown more than once (based on the number of Speaker Engagement records they have), and the other is that it isn’t showing them in any particular order (alphabetical would be best) that is helpful. Created On isn’t great, and other options won’t give you much control.

To fix this, add a new field on the Speaker Engagements table called Display Order and make it a Whole number field.

Back on your List, add a Filter using the new field, and set it that the Display Order must be greater than zero.

Use the Display Order field on the Order by logic to use Ascending. Now go to your Speaker Engagement records for the Event and make sure you set a unique display number for each one you wish to show. If a Speaker has more than one Speaker Engagement you can set the other ones to zero (or leave blank).

Now we can see a list of Speakers that shows each Speaker once, and in alphabetical order. Perfection!

Original Post http://meganvwalker.com/change-order-of-event-speakers-on-event-emails/