Setting Up Custom Events & The Vendors' Perspective

As a buyer, it can be useful to display particular events that may be held in regards to your project currently being run. Within Bonfire, you have the ability to set up and display a schedule of custom events in order to inform your vendors and internal users about events coming up for your project.

Custom Events in Active Projects

To create a custom event, one must begin by logging into their organization's Bonfire portal and navigate to the project you're wanting to create a custom event for:

When you have your Custom Events functionality enabled, one of the first things you will notice is the user interface change on the Project Details page which we would like to quickly highlight for you here. 

If you navigate to the Details section directly under the project timeline, you will notice at the bottom of the section there are 4 pre-populated events already set out for you. These are the Open Date, Close Date, Evaluate By Date, and Questions Due Date. These dates were designated by you when you first created your project and each of their statuses will be updated here as these dates go by.

In the example case below, there is a currently open project and the Events section looks like this:

Once you are on the Project Details page for your selected project you can navigate to the Actions button and click Manage Events which will load the Events Calendar modal:

Within the Events Calendar modal, you're able to create a new event or draft an event to be published at a later date. To do so, first click on the New Event button:

You can then fill in info such as the event name, location, dates, etc. Required fields to publish a custom event are “Title”, “Start Date”, and “Event Privacy”. This makes it fast and easy to create custom events. The ability to create and publish events without an “End Date” allows for point-in-time events.

To create a draft custom event, the only field required is “Title”, meaning users can create placeholder events through their process and fill in the details afterwards.

TIP: When choosing a date and time for your event, you can easily click on the calendar to quickly choose a date without having to type in specific values:

When creating an event you also have the option of setting the event to Public or Internal. A Public event is available to anyone, including vendors when they click on your opportunity, whereas an Internal event is for Bonfire-only users within your organization.

You may also choose if the event is Mandatory or not, which will display as a Yes or No value for users to see: 

Once you have entered in all the information for your event, you can then choose to Save for Later or Publish the event.

Saving an event as a draft will place it under the Draft Events table to be published later, and publishing an event will display it within your project which will appear under the Published Events table as you see here:

After publishing a Public event, we recommend informing your users about the event through a Public Notice. This step is optional if you have already otherwise notified users that the event is occurring, although it is a useful way to inform vendors and other users that an event was created for the project.

You may now proceed to click the Back to Project button to return to your Project Details page:

All actions that copy projects (Create Similar Project, Create Project from Template, Create Draft from Template, etc) will copy over custom events information. The only exception is when you Create a Template from a project, in which case all events are turned into draft events with no dates. This is because these are now project templates, and event date information doesn’t exist.

NOTE: The entire custom events creation process is also accessible in Project Drafts, however, as the project is a draft, published events will not be visible until the project goes live.

Custom Events in Project Templates

Custom events can also be created within your project templates, in a process very similar to the one in active projects but with a few key differences:

• In project templates, events cannot be published as you are only able to create draft custom events. This is because publishing events requires a “Start Date”, and there will not be a "Start Date" within a project template as these events are placeholders to be customized when a project is created from that template.
• This means that the "Start Date" and "End Date" fields cannot be filled out in project template custom events.

Once you create a project from your project template, you will be able to enter Start and End Dates and publish your event just like in any other active project!

Custom Events: The Vendors Perspective

As a vendor, you will be able to see the opportunity on your Portal if the project is Public. First, begin by clicking on the View Opportunity button of the project you wish to view: 

This will show you the vendors version of the Project Details page, and if events have been created for the project then they will be displayed under the Project Description with a heading titled Important Events: 

That's all for Custom Events! As a Vendor, you are able to complete your submission as usual from here.