Setting Up a New Event

This is the shape of a new event in ema: an organization, a project, a set of modules, a team, and a go-live. It is deliberately shallow. Each module's real chain of work — the ordering, the decisions, and the places it quietly breaks — lives in that module's journey, and this page hands you off to the right one at the right moment.

First time using ema?

Phase 1 only applies to your very first sign-in. After that, start at Phase 2.

New Event Setup Flow

Which modules do you need?

Modules decide what exists in a project at all. Disabling one hides its navigation and keeps its data, so nothing is lost by turning one off — but a module you never turn on has no surface for the rest of the setup to attach to.

Module	What it brings
Core (always on)	Project basics, tasks, people, documents, roles, and settings
Accommodation	Hotels, room blocks, bookings, and guest accommodation
Content & Comms	Knowledge base, email templates, email builder, and content pages
CPD/CE	Accreditation programs, categories, cycles, and requirements
Engagement	Networking, Q&A, polls, surveys, and notifications
Exhibition	Exhibitor management, floor plans, compliance, tiers, and allocations
Financials	Orders, invoices, payments, credit notes, budget, and deals
Gamification	Badges, challenges, leaderboards, multipliers, and teams
Integrations	EventsAir, SharePoint, and third-party integrations
Programme & Submissions	Speakers, talks, sessions, schedule builder, and submission reviews
Registration	Registrants, groups, waitlist, registration types, and payment plans
Streaming	Live streaming for virtual and hybrid events
Video	Video library, analytics, and voice content tooling
Wayfinding	Indoor navigation, venue maps, kiosk mode, and POI routing

Rather than pick from that list cold, start from an event template. Each one pre-selects a module set you can still add to:

Template	Modules it turns on
Webinar	Core, Registration, Streaming, Video, CPD/CE
Corporate Event	Core, Registration, Financials, Content & Comms
Conference	Core, Programme & Submissions, Registration, Exhibition, Financials, CPD/CE, Accommodation
Trade Show	Core, Exhibition, Registration, Financials
Custom	Core only — pick your own

Modules can be enabled later from Settings > Modules, so this is not a decision you have to get right on day one. See Modules for what each one adds to the navigation.

Phase 1: Organization setup (first time only)

Your organization is the top-level container for every event you run. You do this once.

1. Sign in for the first time. The setup wizard launches automatically.
2. Enter your organization name, primary contact email, and website.
3. Set your branding: primary colour, accent colour, and logo. These appear on public-facing pages and emails.
4. Invite your first team members by email.

Before you move on: the organization exists, branding looks right on the preview, and your core team have accepted their invitations.

Skipping branding is the mistake worth naming: every email and public page falls back to default ema branding, which reads as unfinished to the first attendee who sees it.

See Organizations and User Management.

Phase 2: Create the project

Every event lives inside a project. The project holds the schedule, speakers, budget, tasks, exhibitors, registrations, and documents.

1. Click New Project from the admin dashboard.
2. Enter the project basics:
   • Name — the event name as attendees will see it
   • Start and end dates — the project's days are generated from this range, one per calendar date
   • Timezone — every time in the schedule, registration windows, and emails is interpreted in it
   • Organization — which organization owns this event
   • Location — venue name and address
   • Description — a short summary shown on public pages
3. Choose how to start: an event template, a custom hand-picked module set, or a clone of a previous project's full configuration.

The timezone is the one field you cannot correct later

The wizard pre-fills the timezone from the client organization's default and falls back to the browser's, so a project stood up by a producer in another country inherits their zone unless somebody looks at the field. Confirmation happens automatically for every project created through the wizard, and once confirmed the zone is locked — an update that changes it is refused, and the only remedy offered is creating a new project. Set it to the venue's zone, in the wizard, deliberately.

Two smaller traps sit alongside it. The end date is inclusive, so an event running Monday through Wednesday ends on Wednesday — and because project days are derived from the range rather than edited directly, a schedule missing its last day is almost always a project whose end date is one short. And "TBC" in the location field propagates to attendees, speakers, and exhibitors at once; put the real venue in as soon as you have it.

See Project Setup for the full reference.

Phase 3: Choose how each module is configured

For every module you enabled, pick a setup method:

Method	Best for
Defaults	Getting a working project quickly. Fine-tune later.
Configure	Answering two to four questions to tailor the module to this event.
Clone	Copying configuration from an existing project. Best for recurring events.

Start lean or configure deeply?

Use defaults when you need a working project quickly, configure when the event has requirements you already know, and clone when a previous project is a trusted match for this one. Note that cloning adds rather than replaces — bringing task templates into a project that already has similarly named ones leaves you with both.

Phase 4: Add the team

Project membership lives on the People tab of the project overview, and the roles that govern it live under Access Roles.

1. Open the project's People tab and add the team.
2. Give each person a role. Roles are built per project from permission groups rather than chosen from a fixed list; ema seeds a starting set — Viewer, Editor, Manager, Admin, Check-In Staff, and Session Monitor — that you can use as they are or build on.
3. Set up client organization access if external stakeholders need to see project data through the client portal.

Adding the team is two problems wearing one label

A person must already have an ema account before they can be added to a project at all, so half the delay in getting a team onto a project is a user-management task nobody assigned. The other half is the role: ema warns about permission combinations that will not work in practice — being able to edit something without being able to view it — but those warnings appear while you are building the role, not later when a contractor reports an empty page.

For who-can-see-what across tenant staff, event staff, and the client, follow Who sees what rather than working it out per screen. See also User Assignments.

Phase 5: Walk each module's journey

This is where setup stops being generic. Each module has a chain of work with its own ordering and its own failure modes, and following that chain is what turns an enabled module into a working one.

Module	Follow
Core	New project to operating baseline, then Who sees what
Registration	Registration open to badge in hand, then Group and delegate changes
Programme & Submissions	Call for papers to published programme, then Speaker commitment to stage-ready
Exhibition	Sponsorship sell to floor, then Exhibitor self-service to onsite-ready
Financials	Price the job, then Budget to margin and Quote to cash
Accommodation	Accommodation block to guest arrived
Content & Comms	Build the public site, then Comms cadence
Engagement, Gamification	Engagement during the event
CPD/CE	Attendance to CPD certificate
Streaming, Video	Session delivery and capture, then Content afterlife
Wayfinding	Onsite readiness to doors open
Integrations	Integration health

Each module's tab on the project Overview page also carries its own setup checklist until that module's core configuration is complete, with a progress count and a link from every step to the settings page it covers. Steps that depend on a setting owned by a different module are flagged as such, which is the fastest way to find configuration that is not where you would look for it.

Phase 6: Content and communication

Prepare what your attendees, speakers, and exhibitors will actually read, before any of them receive anything.

1. Customise the email templates for each key moment: registration confirmation, submission confirmation, acceptance and decline, exhibitor welcome, payment receipt, and the pre-event reminder. See Email Builder.
2. Publish knowledge base articles for venue details, travel and accommodation, and an FAQ covering registration, refunds, accessibility, and Wi-Fi. See Knowledge Base.
3. Build the forms you will need: post-event survey, exhibitor application, dietary requirements, volunteer sign-up. See Form Builder.

The registration confirmation is the first thing an attendee ever receives from you. Customise it before registration opens, not after.

Phase 7: Go live

Before announcing the event

Use this before sharing registration links, submission links, or public pages with attendees, speakers, exhibitors, or clients.

Project basics

• Event name, dates, and location are correct
• The timezone is the venue's, checked in the wizard rather than accepted from the pre-fill
• Organization branding (logo, colours) is set

Registration (if enabled)

• At least one registration type is public, active, and inside its publish window
• Price tier windows tile the calendar without overlapping, and a test checkout confirmed the price a real buyer sees
• The confirmation email template is customised and tested
• The payment provider is connected and tested with a real transaction
• Capacity limits are set on each registration type
• Exactly one badge category is marked default, and the badge template renders the category bar

Programme (if enabled)

• Tracks and formats are defined
• Submission forms are mapped to tracks
• The submission window's open and close dates are set
• A review configuration exists with scoring criteria
• Sessions, talks, project days, and the portal are all published — checked from the attendee's side of the site

Exhibition (if enabled)

• The floor plan is published, with booths drawn and numbered
• Exhibitor tiers exist and every promised benefit is an entitlement with a quantity, not only a line of Benefits text

Content

• The knowledge base has venue information and an FAQ published
• Every email template is customised rather than default

Team

• Everyone has a role whose permission warnings were read before saving
• At least one other person has full access — do not be the single point of failure

Publishing

1. Publish registration — this opens the public registration page.
2. Open talk submissions — this activates the submission portal.
3. Share the public event URL with your audience.
4. Watch the admin dashboard for registrations, submissions, tasks, and budget.

After go-live

• Additional modules can be enabled at any time from Settings > Modules.
• The AI assistant answers questions about your own event data, from "how many registrations this week?" to "which speakers have not uploaded slides?". See AI Assistant.
• The standing rhythms that keep a live project honest are Weekly ops rhythm and Monthly finance close.

Related Workflow

Every chain of work an event runs on, grouped by phase and filterable by scenario and role.

Open workflow