Events & Registrations Overview

Events let your school run sign-ups for anything families attend — an open house, a field trip, a spring gala, a fundraiser. You create the event, share one link, and Lazarus handles the rest: the registration page, the questions you need answered, payment at sign-up, and a roster that fills itself in. This guide orients you around how events work before you create your first one.

The Big Picture

An event in Lazarus is really two things working together:

The event — the page you set up once. It holds the date and location, the price, any extras or volunteer slots, and the questions you want families to answer.
The registrations — each family's sign-up. A registration covers one registrant (usually a parent) and every attendee they bring, along with their answers, extras, and payment.

Everything you configure on the event shapes what families see when they register. Get the event right, and your roster takes care of itself.

The Event Lifecycle

Most events move through the same sequence:

Create the event — Add the name, date, location, capacity, and who can register. Every event starts as a draft.
Set pricing and extras — Make it free, or charge per person or per family. Add optional extras like t-shirts or meals.
Build your registration form — Add custom questions, asked once per registration or once for each attendee.
Publish and share — Publishing opens registration and makes the event page live. Then share the link wherever families look.
Invite families — Email personal invitations to specific families and track who's viewed and who's registered.
Manage your roster — Watch registrations arrive, record cash payments, handle refunds and cancellations, and check people in on the day.

Where to Find Everything

Click Events in the left sidebar. The Events page lists every event with its date, status, price, registration count, and how much you've collected. From the list you can preview an event's public page, copy its registration link, or open the ⋯ menu for more actions.

Open any event to see its Roster, its Custom questions, attendee and collected totals, the share link, and an At a glance summary of how the event is set up.

Key Concepts to Know

A few ideas come up throughout these guides:

Event status — Every event is a Draft until you publish it. A Published event is live and can take registrations. A Canceled event is closed, and its registrants have been notified.
Registrant and attendees — The registrant is the person who fills out the form and receives the emails. Attendees are everyone coming, and each one is named. A parent can register themselves and two children in a single registration.
Question scope — Custom questions are asked either once per Registration or once for each Attendee.
Registration status — A registration is Started while the family is filling in the form, Awaiting payment once they've registered for a paid event but haven't paid, and Registered once it's free, paid, or marked paid by you.

What Your Plan Includes

Free events are available on every Lazarus plan. Some event features depend on your plan:

Basic — Charge for tickets and extras, with payment collected at registration.
Premium — Everything in Basic, plus early-bird pricing, payment methods set per event, refund requests, virtual events, inventory limits on extras, volunteer slots, a QR code for every event, calendar files in confirmation emails, check-in, duplicating events, and a public page listing all of your upcoming events.

Throughout these guides, features that need Basic or Premium are called out where they appear.

Before You Start

Two things should be in place before you create your first event:

A school year — Every event is filed under your current school year, so set one up first if you haven't. See Create Your First School Year in the Getting Started guide.
Stripe connected — If you plan to charge for tickets or extras, connect Stripe so you can accept payments. A paid event can't be published until Stripe is connected. See Connect to Stripe. Free events don't need Stripe.

Tip: Your first event doesn't have to be a big one. A free open house or info night is a great way to learn the workflow before you run a paid event.