Introducing Organizations on Fourwaves

This year we're introducing Organizations on Fourwaves. This blog post aims to explain what Organizations are, why we're introducing them and what you need to know.

What are Organizations?

You can see an Organization as a home for all your events. For example, if you plan events for a research society, you can create an Organization for the society and give admin access to your colleagues. All your events and their data will be centralized under one shared workspace.

Organizations are not new. In fact, they've been within Fourwaves since 2019, but only in 2024 will their full power be unleashed. It's a long term project that will continue to develop over the years.

Examples of Organizations include:

• A research society;
• A university department;
• An national or international association of academics;
• A provincial-wide research group;
• An informal community of researchers that meet every year.

Why Organizations?

Academic and research groups have been using Fourwaves since 2012. Many of them have dozens, some hundreds of events and the organizing committee varies from one event to another. Before Organizations there was no clear ownership of those events, it was not possible to have an overview of the data and this caused inefficiencies.

Grouping events under one account, an Organization, will unlock tremendous possibilities for you and your team:

• Gain control over who can access your data;
• Consolidate data from past editions to better plan future events;
• Purchase, renew and upgrade your plan more easily;
• Streamline the connection of your events to your payment gateways;
• Facilitate API integrations and synchronize your data with external platforms.

The possibilities are endless! Book a demo with us if you'd like to chat about the possibilities to streamline your events.

What you Need to Know

Here are a few things you need to know about the upcoming release of Organizations:

• You will soon be invited to 1) create your Organization, 2) invite admins and 3) associate past events to it;
• An admin inherits edit access to all events of the Organization. Event organizers added under Configuration > Committee will still keep access, but not to other events of your Organization;
• You can be an admin of multiple Organizations, but each event can only be associated with one;
• It will be mandatory to create an Organization before you create a new event. Each event will need to be owned by an Organization;
• The Organizer Dashboard you see when you login that lists all your events will be replaced by a new Organization Dashboard;
• For PCOs, we recommend that you create an Organization for each of your customers as it will keep the data separated, will facilitate access and future integrations.

Updates to Plans

Our goal is to streamline the way you purchase and use Fourwaves.

When you create or clone an event, only the features in the free plan will be accessible. To unlock more features, you can either A) purchase an annual plan for your organization or B) unlock an event à-la-carte.

Licence codes will stop from being distributed. Existing licence codes will continue to work until they expire, but will be discontinued.

Release Phases

Organizations started to be deployed already since the beginning of April 2024. It will be deployed in 4 phases throughout the next few months.

Phase 1 (May 2024)

• A visual revamp of the Organization Dashboard and its sections.

Phase 2 (August 8th 2024)

• Allowing users to create organizations and associate existing events to them.
• Organizations will be mandatory when you create a new event.

Phase 3 (Approx. Sept 2024)

• Access to free plan features only, unless you unlock the event with a licence code or that your Organization has a plan.
• The ability to purchase a plan and add-ons through the platform in a self-serve way.

How to Associate Passed Events to your Organization

When you login to Fourwaves and you have no organization for the events you organize, you will be prompted to create a new organization, add admins and associate events to it.

Step 1 - Create an organization

Enter the organization's name. Make it as specific as possible. For instance don't simply use your university's name, supplement it with the department. Examples of good Organization names include: Neuroscience Department, Université de Montréal or Canadian Society for Microbiologists.

Enter a billing address, which will be use to simplify the checkout process when you purchase events.

Step 2 - Add admins

You can enter the email addresses of colleagues who you wish to be administrators of your organizations. They will gain organizer permission to all events of the organization. You can add/remove admins later on.

Step 3 - Associate past events

You will be shown events you organize that are not associated with an organization or that are associated with another organization that you're an admin of. You can select which events you wish to associated to your new organization.

You can always switch an event's organization to another afterwards if needed.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please feel free to book a moment to chat with us.