Golf Days
Most businesses organise their first few events in a spreadsheet, and for a small guest list, that works fairly well. The trouble starts once you’ve run the same event two or three times, or when more than one person needs to work on it. Somebody adds a column the others don’t know about, two versions get emailed around, and by the day itself nobody’s entirely sure who’s actually coming.
A CRM handles event management differently, and a golf day is a useful way to walk through how it works, because it touches all four of the main contact management tools: segments, tags, custom fields, and lists. None of them is complicated individually. The value’s in how they work together.
Step one: work out who to invite
Before any invite goes out, you need a starting list, and not everyone in the database belongs on it. For a golf day, you’d probably want people who are reasonably local and who’ve had recent contact with you, rather than a name that’s sat untouched since 2022.
This is what a segment is for. You set the conditions once: contacts within a certain distance of a location, who’ve opened an email in the last twelve months, say, and the CRM builds the list for you. Call it something you’ll recognise later: “Active Birmingham Contacts” is more useful in six months’ time than “Segment 4.”
The advantage over a spreadsheet filter is that a segment stays live. As new contacts meet the conditions or existing ones stop engaging and drop out, the list updates automatically. Run the same event again next year and half your invite list is already sitting there.
Step two: track who’s actually confirmed
Invites go out via email, and replies come back in roughly three shapes: yes, maybe, and nothing at all. Keeping track of that in a spreadsheet means a column for each, updated by hand, every time.
A tag does this more simply. Anyone who confirms gets tagged with something specific to the event, for example, GolfDay26. From there, checking your current headcount is a single search. Sending a reminder to confirmed guests only is the same search, filtered to email. New replies get tagged as they land, so the number is never a day out of date.
It’s worth agreeing on the exact wording of the tag before anyone starts using it. “GolfDay26,” “Golf Day 2026,” and “golfday” look identical to a person reading them but are completely different in a search. Decide the format once, write it down somewhere the whole team can see, and stick to it. A tag is only as useful as it is consistent.
Top Tip: Automate the invite process further by including a link in the invite email to a lead form on your website, and having responses from that form automatically update fields in your CRM – you wouldn’t have to do anything manually!
Step three: record the details that don’t change
Somewhere in the replies, people will mention things that aren’t specific to this one event: dietary requirements, job title, which industry they’re in. That’s useful for seating plans and introductions on the day, but it’s also useful well beyond it.
This is where custom fields come in, and the distinction between a custom field and a tag matters. A tag is temporary, tied to one campaign or event, and you’d expect to remove it afterwards. A custom field holds information that’s generally true about a contact. Industry sector doesn’t stop being true once the golf day’s over, so it belongs in a field, not a tag. Fill it in once, and it’s available for every future event, campaign or report, not just this one.
Step four: handle the exceptions
However well you define a segment, some people won’t fit its conditions and still need to be on the list. A handful of long-standing clients might live outside your usual radius, or haven’t opened an email in a while for reasons that have nothing to do with their relationship with you. Your account managers will usually know exactly who these people are without needing a rule to justify it.
This is what a list is for. Where a segment is built from conditions, a list is built by hand, added to by whoever knows the database well enough to make the call. Segments answer “who matches these criteria.” Lists answer “these specific people, because someone who knows them said so.” Most events end up using a bit of both: a segment for the bulk of the invitations, a list for the handful who should always be included regardless.
Why it’s worth setting up properly
None of this is difficult once it exists, and that’s the point. The work of defining a segment or agreeing on a tag format happens once, and after that, anyone on the team can use it correctly without needing to be talked through it. Your account manager can pull together a list of VIPs, marketing can build and maintain the segment, and whoever’s at the door on the day can search a tag and instantly see who’s turned up and who hasn’t, all from the same, up-to-date set of records.
A spreadsheet can just about handle one of those jobs, done by one person, for one event. It struggles considerably more when several people need to work on it at once, or when you’re trying to reuse what you built for the next event rather than starting from scratch. A CRM’s contact management tools exist for exactly that gap, and an event is one of the clearest ways to see the difference in practice.
Finessing and Following-up
The beauty of tagging people who are going to attend is that you can send them follow-up instructions such as “How to get to the Event” emails and “Here’s the format for the day”. This builds interest and reminds them of their commitment to the event.
Plus, you can follow up on those tardy members of your segment who haven’t replied yet. Set up a search in your database for your segment, excluding those with email replies and your new GolfDay26 tag, and you’ll get the list of people who didn’t reply. Now, you can remind them of other benefits of attending the Golf Day – meeting new people, networking, an excellent course, great food, the chance to see your new product, etc.
Quick reference
- Segment: a group defined by conditions that updates automatically as contacts meet or stop meeting them. Best for the bulk of an invite list.
- Tag: a short-term label added to individual records, usually tied to one campaign or event. Best for tracking who’s confirmed, replied, or taken a specific action.
- Custom field: a permanent piece of information about a contact, reusable across all future events or campaigns. Best for details that don’t change from event to event.
- List: a manually built group, added to by someone who knows the contacts personally. Best for exceptions a rule wouldn’t catch.