What is the best practice for tracking total number of attendees?

Question

I have been using activities to track "events" for my Church. These are not events that one would register to attend but rather things like Bible Study, Sunday Worship, etc. I've been double working by creating the activities and then creating drupal nodes for the public calendar. I don't want to have to do that anymore. I tried to find a way to get an Activity feed from Civi (with ability to filter by activity type) so that I could use Feeds in Drupal to import them to nodes but could never find a solution. Events has a feed that works with Feeds and so I'm thinking of moving to using civiEvent to track these. Here's the issue....Most of these "events" we don't track who actually attends but instead only the total number of people in attendance. I thought of creating custom fields to input this on the Events but that then shows that data publicly when the Event is viewed.

Any suggestions on how I can stop double working and still be able to track this information?

Answer 1

You should definitely use CiviEvent. You can still make the events visible via Feeds, just don't turn on online registration for them. To track attendance, create a generic contact named Anonymous Attendee. Create a Price Set that lets you enter a quantity, and make the price $0.

Now you can add a single registration per event (with the actual number of attendees) under this generic contact. You get reports with no custom code or extra effort. Why track attendance if you're not using that info for decision-making purposes, right? In the future, if you ever decide to have people sign up (or sign in), the architecture is already in place.

Answer 2

You can use this extension to hide private fields (eg the number of attendants)

https://civicrm.org/extensions/allow-have-private-custom-fields-event-arent-displayed-info-page

check out the documentation, you have to give a specific name (starting with "private" to the group containing the fields you want to be hidden