Outreach: Events

By Summit53 Team

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Overview

Events turns booth conversations into owned next actions. You set up an event with its owners, booth team, qualification questions, and follow-up rules; booth staff capture each conversation the moment it happens; and every capture is reconciled to a lead, routed to an owner, and placed in a prioritised follow-up queue. Nothing is sent automatically — Events records and organises the follow-up, and your team does the outreach.

Open it from Acquisition → Events (/outreach/events). The list shows each event with its status, dates, venue and booth, capture count, event owner, and default lead owner, plus a link to the next action that suits your role — for example Open booth quick entry or Resolve readiness blockers.

Who can do what

  • Organisation owners and admins — create events, run readiness checks, change event status, import attendee lists, and correct or retry captures.
  • Event staff — the event owner and anyone on the event’s booth team. They can use booth quick entry, view capture operations, and work their own follow-up queue.
  • Everyone else in the organisation can see an event’s overview only.

If you open a tab you don’t have access to, Summit53 shows a notice explaining who to ask — an organisation owner or admin can add you to the event team.

Event lifecycle

Every event moves through five statuses: Draft → Ready → Live → Completed → Archived. Admins move an event forward with the button in the event header: Mark ready, Go live, Complete event, and Archive event.

An event cannot be marked ready or taken live until its readiness check passes — the button stays disabled with the hint "Resolve readiness blockers first". Completed and archived events no longer accept new booth captures, but existing captures remain available in operations and follow-up.

Creating and setting up an event

  1. On the Events page, click Create event.
  2. Fill in the setup form (described below). Event name, Event owner, and Default lead owner are required.
  3. Click Create draft event. The event opens on its Setup & readiness tab.
  4. Click Run readiness check and resolve any Required blockers. Recommendations are listed separately and don’t block.
  5. When it reads Operationally ready, click Mark ready, then Go live when the event starts.

To change an existing event, edit the form on Setup & readiness and click Save event configuration; readiness is checked again on save.

Event details

Give booth staff clear physical and schedule context: Event name, Event type, Internal slug (generated from the name if left blank), Venue, Booth, Starts, Ends, IANA timezone, Budget, Currency, and a CRM campaign reference (for reference only — it does not trigger CRM sync).

Ownership and booth team

Choose the Event owner and the Default lead owner. The default lead owner is mandatory because it is the safe fallback when a capture can’t be routed to anyone else. Tick each member of the Booth team who will capture conversations.

Qualification schema

Add the questions booth staff should ask. Each question has a Label, a Stable key, an Answer type (Short text, Long text, Single select, Multi select, Yes / no, or Number), and a Required checkbox. Select questions take their options one per line. Use Add qualification question for up to 20 questions. Required questions drive completeness reporting, but an incomplete capture is always saved and can be completed later.

Routing and follow-up

  • Routing strategy — Event default owner, or Configured owner with fallback with a chosen routing owner.
  • Follow-up SLA (hours) — how quickly captures should be followed up (24 hours by default).
  • Follow-up sequence — marks which sequence captures are eligible for. Selecting a sequence does not enrol or send anything.
  • Hot-lead score threshold — the score (0–100) at which a capture counts as hot.
  • Allowed follow-up channels — Email, Phone, SMS, and LinkedIn.
  • Allow authorised reassignment of existing leads — leave this off to keep an existing lead’s owner; the event default still applies to new leads.

Enter the Collection and follow-up notice staff read when recording consent, its Notice version, and a Privacy URL.

Capturing conversations: Booth quick entry

Booth quick entry is built for speed at the stand: capture first, reconcile after. Every field is optional, so you can save whatever you have.

  1. Open the event and go to Booth quick entry (or click Open booth quick entry from the Events list).
  2. Fill in what you can across the sections:
    • Identity and contact — name, email, phone, LinkedIn URL, company, and title.
    • Conversation context — Booth notes, Interests, Temperature (Cold, Warm, Hot), and Score (0–100).
    • Qualification — the event’s configured questions.
    • Next step and consent — Recommended next step, Meeting state, Follow-up due, and a consent record for each allowed channel (Granted, Denied, or Unknown / not established).
  3. Click Save capture and clear form. The form clears for the next person and confirms "Capture saved — ready for the next person".

Saving doesn’t wait for reconciliation and doesn’t send outreach. If the connection drops, your entry stays on screen with "The capture could not be saved" — simply retry; resubmitting the same entry won’t create a duplicate.

Importing an attendee list

Admins can bring in an exported attendee or lead list on the Event import tab. Every row becomes an event capture before reconciliation.

  1. Click Choose an event export file. CSV, TSV, and XLSX are supported; export legacy XLS files as XLSX or CSV first.
  2. Under Field mapping, map each column to a Summit53 field or leave it as Ignore column. Common headers are mapped automatically, and Advanced JSON lets you edit the mapping directly.
  3. Click Generate event preview and review the outcomes: Created / ready, Replayed, Quarantined, and Failed, with any validation errors per row.
  4. Click Commit event import. The import runs in the background and the results update to Committed outcomes when it finishes.

Capture operations

Capture operations keeps every accepted capture visible through identity matching, routing, and processing. Switch between All captures and Needs reconciliation. Each capture card shows how and when it was captured, its reconciliation and processing state, the linked lead (or Unresolved capture), the owner, qualification completeness, temperature and score, the routing reason, meeting state, follow-up due date, and any recoverable failure. Click View processing evidence to see its audit trail.

Admins can act on a capture:

  • Retry — re-queue processing for a capture that failed or stalled.
  • Correct — fix captured details and click Save correction. Email and LinkedIn URL are locked while the capture is linked to a lead.
  • Unlink — detach the capture from its lead (for example, if it matched the wrong person). Event attribution is kept.

Booth team members can view capture state but not use these controls.

Follow-up queue

The Follow-up queue lists captures in the server’s priority order, so actionable, hot, and overdue records rise to the top. No messages or sequences are triggered here. Admins and the event owner can switch the Owner filter between owners, or view All owners and unresolved routing; booth members see only their own queue.

Each item is marked Actionable follow-up or Needs operational resolution, with Hot lead and Overdue flags where they apply. It shows the recommended action, the owner, the due date, temperature and score, qualification completeness, meeting state, processing state, which channels are eligible for follow-up, sequence eligibility, and any reasons a channel is excluded (such as missing consent).

Troubleshooting

  • Mark ready or Go live is disabled — run the readiness check on Setup & readiness and resolve every required blocker.
  • "This event is closed for new captures" — the event is completed or archived; existing captures remain in operations and follow-up.
  • "This event is outside your booth assignment" — ask an organisation owner or admin to add you to the event’s booth team.
  • A capture has no channel eligible for follow-up — check that the event allows the channel and that consent was recorded as Granted.
  • "Legacy XLS exports are not supported" — re-export the file as XLSX or CSV.