GC Events: setup and registration questions, answered

Setting up an event should feel as good as the event itself. This guide walks through the registration and ticketing questions that come up most often, so you can build with confidence and spend your energy on the people who'll show up.

1.  Who can see and register for my event?

Your event lives on its own registration page, reachable through the link you share. GiveCampus doesn't list it in a public, searchable directory — people get there because you sent them the link. The practical takeaway: treat that link as shareable. Anyone who has it can open the page and register, so there's no built-in "invite-only" mode that checks a guest against a pre-approved list.

If you need tighter control, you have a few good options:

• Share selectively. Send the registration link only to your intended audience rather than posting it publicly.
• Restrict ticket types by affiliation. You can limit a ticket type so it's only available to registrants (or guests) with a specific affiliation — helpful when, say, only reunion-year alumni should see a particular ticket.
• Use a back-end-only ticket type. Hidden ticket types don't appear on the public form, so you can register select people yourself without exposing that option to everyone (see Free and back-end-only tickets).

2. Letting guests stay off the public guest list

During registration, each guest sees a checkbox labeled Exclude name(s) from the public Guest List. When they check it, their name is replaced with "Anonymous Guest" anywhere the guest list shows — the landing page and the confirmation page — and their email is never displayed.

This is the registrant's choice to make, so there's nothing you need to configure ahead of time. As an admin, you can also see and set this on any registration record when you're managing registrations on someone's behalf.

3. What "Exclude from Guest List?" means on uploads

When you add registrants offline — especially through a bulk upload — you'll see an Exclude From Guest List? column on the template. It's the same control as the anonymous checkbox above, just in spreadsheet form.

• Enter Yes (or True) to keep that person off the public guest list — they'll show as "Anonymous Guest."
• Leave it blank (or enter No) and they'll appear on the guest list normally.

So "exclude from guest list" doesn't remove the person from your event or your reporting — they're fully registered. It only controls whether their name is visible to the public.

4. Uploading or adding registrants without emailing them

This is the big one for migrations and back-office cleanup: adding offline registrations does not email those guests by default. Confirmation emails for offline registrations are turned off unless you deliberately switch them on, so you can safely upload people who already registered somewhere else without sending a confusing duplicate confirmation.

If you do want offline registrants to receive a confirmation, you can enable that in the event's email settings before you upload. Otherwise, leave it off and your upload stays silent.

5. Tickets vs. packages (and how many tickets a package includes)

Two building blocks power your registration form:

• Ticket types are individual options — "Single Golfer," "Gala Seat," "Hole Sponsor." Each one shows up as its own selectable option on the form.
• Packages bundle ticket types together — for example, a "Foursome" package that includes four golfer tickets.

Each line in a package includes at least one ticket — you can't set a package line to include zero. If you want to offer something like a hole sponsorship that comes with no admission, don't build it as a package; create it as its own standalone ticket type instead (more on pricing that below).

On the layout question we hear from golf and gala organizers: the prompt above the ticket list ("Select your ticket") is fixed and isn't editable. But you control every ticket type's name, so the cleanest way to separate, say, a single golfer from a hole sponsor is to create each as its own clearly named ticket type. You can also customize the register button text in your event settings to better match your event's tone.

6. Pricing, fair market value, and where the gift goes

Every paid ticket and package has two numbers: a price and a fair market value (FMV) — the value of what the guest receives in return (dinner, greens fees, and the like). GiveCampus splits the payment for you:

• The FMV portion covers the cost of what they got and isn't tax-deductible.
• Everything above FMV is the tax-deductible gift.

So yes — for a $500 hole sponsorship with a $0 fair market value, the full $500 is a gift. For a $150 gala ticket with a $75 dinner value, $75 is FMV and $75 is the tax-deductible gift.

You can point the gift portion to a designation, and the FMV portion can route to its own designation as well, so your accounting lands exactly where you expect.

7. Free, $0, and back-end-only tickets

Need a comp ticket or an admin-only option? You have two tools:

• Free ($0) tickets. Set a ticket type's price to $0 and it shows as "Free" on the form. (Paid tickets, by contrast, start at $0.50.)
• Back-end-only (hidden) ticket types. Mark a ticket type as hidden and it won't appear on the public registration form — you use it when registering people yourself. This is the right way to handle comps, staff, or VIPs you don't want the general public to select.

If you've created comp or hidden tickets and they aren't appearing where you register guests on the back end, double-check that the ticket type is active and that you're registering through the admin (offline) flow rather than the public form.

8. How the waitlist works

When your event fills up, the waitlist captures interested guests — but it puts you in control of who gets in. Waitlisted guests are never registered automatically. When space opens, you invite the people you choose, and each invite sends them a time-limited link to complete their own registration. If they don't finish before the invite expires, their spot stays open for someone else.

The waitlist can trigger two ways:

• By overall capacity — when your event's total guest limit is reached.
• By ticket type — you can set a specific ticket type to send guests to the waitlist once it sells out, even if the event overall still has room.

So increasing overall capacity later won't auto-admit anyone — you'll still invite waitlisted guests when you're ready, and they'll complete registration from there.

9. Unpublishing an event

You can unpublish an event only if no one has registered yet. The moment a registration exists, unpublishing is off the table — that protects your registered guests' records and their confirmations.

If the Unpublish option isn't available and you're sure no one has completed a registration, the usual culprit is an in-progress or reserved ticket — someone started checking out and is holding a spot. Those count as registrations for this purpose. A couple of options:

• If the event truly has no registrations and you simply want it off your live page, cancel the event instead — that's always available for an active event that hasn't ended.
• If you think a stray reserved ticket is blocking you, reach out to Support and we'll take a look.

10. Linking a campaign to your event

Your event and its giving campaign are separate things, and they don't have to be built at the same moment. It's perfectly fine to open registration now and link the campaign later once your team has finalized this year's goal and design.

The simplest way to connect them is to launch the event from the campaign you want it tied to. If your event already exists and you'd like to associate a campaign after the fact, you can update that in the event's settings — and if you don't see the option, Support can link them for you.

11. Promo codes and registration links

Promo codes are entered by the guest on the registration page — they type the code and it's applied to their order. You can set a code's discount, date window, usage limit, and whether it applies to add-ons and activities.

What's not available today is a link that pre-fills or auto-applies a promo code for the guest (there's no ?promo_code= style parameter). If a seamless, no-typing experience is important for your audience, the practical alternative is to bake the discount into a dedicated ticket type or package and share that directly, rather than relying on a code.

12. Sending event reminders by ticket type

Automated event reminders through Sequences go to all of your event's registrants — there isn't a way to target a Sequence reminder to a single ticket type right now.

When you need to reach just one group (for example, only the guests who bought the tasting-and-transportation package), the reliable workaround is to:

1. Pull your event report and filter or sort by ticket type to isolate that audience.
2. Send that group a targeted message directly, rather than through the all-registrants Sequence.

If ticket-type targeting for reminders would make a real difference for your events, tell us — partner feedback like this shapes what we build next.