With Event Manager, each event is maintained in a separate file. When a second event includes the same attendees, contact information from the earlier event can be imported into the later file. But only limited information about their participation in one event is carried forward to succeeding events.
Summit Central is a more generalized contact management package. It allows you to work flexibly with your people outside of their participation in events. At the same time it pulls together the historical information of each person's participation in multiple events—in other words, who attended what event and in what capacity they attended. It has very flexible filtering capabilities, so that groups can be defined precisely, and any group can be exported to a new event file. Thus, when you’re building a database in an event file, there are several ways of populating it: manually typing in the data for each person, receiving the data from a Web registration page, importing from a previous event which involved some or all of the people, importing from another data source such as a spreadsheet, and exporting to the event file from Summit Central.
At the conclusion of the event, Summit Central can import the records from the event file back into the master database; in the process, it updates each participant's attendance history and (if you choose) their contact information, and creates (again, if you wish) new records for people who were not already in the database. |
