Every event in CiviPlus needs to have an Event Type assigned. This allows you to organise and categorise your events, and helps when reporting or filtering if you have many events in your CiviPlus system.

You can also use the Event Type to decide what custom fields, default settings or other configurations are appropriate - not all Events need the same information stored against them.

Perhaps one of the most important uses of the Event Type is to segment your communications - for example, you can send targeted emails only to people who attended events of a specific type, such as educational workshops or volunteer training sessions. Is a similar vein, the Event Type can be used in CiviPlus to trigger specific Workflow Automations - for instance, you can set up different follow-up emails or reminders for different event categories.

CiviPlus comes with a set of default Event Types:

You can view these and any other Event Types that have been created on your system by navigating to Administer -> CiviEvent -> Event Types.

To create a new Event Type, simply click the ADD EVENT TYPE button on the page above, and complete the form that gets presented.

Give the new Event Type a meaningful Label and Description. You can leave the Value field to it's default, since it is for internal use only. You can also leave the Order field as is, unless you want to move the order that this new Event Type will appear in any dropdown lists up or down (the lower the number the earlier in the list it will appear). Finally, you can say whether this Event Type is Enabled.

Click the SAVE button, and the new Event Type will be available as part of event and template configuration, searching and reporting.