Invitations: selling places in advance

An invitation is a block of places on a course or a bundle, behind a single link. You decide how many places and what they cost; whoever has the link uses them up one at a time.

It is how an organisation buys training for its staff, and how you give places to a group without adding them one by one.

Before you make one

Every course it covers must be by invitation, not open to anyone. A course left open can be joined for free by anybody who finds it, and the places you sold are worth nothing.

Grapevine checks this for you. If any course covered by the invitation is open, you are told at the moment you create it and offered the chance to close them there and then. Take it. See Closing a course before you sell places in it.

Making one

1. In Site Admin, open the invitations panel and start a new one.
2. Choose a course or a bundle.
3. Set how many places.
4. Set the price per place, or leave it at zero to give them — see Pricing an invitation, and comping places.
5. Optionally set an expiry — see When an invitation expires.
6. Save. You get a link.

The link

Send it to whoever is receiving the places. Anybody who opens it can take a place: they sign in or create an account, and they are enrolled.

The link is not personal. It is the places that are finite, so passing it around uses them up — which is exactly how it is meant to work for an organisation distributing to its own people, and worth saying out loud when you send it.

Watching it

The invitations panel shows each one with how many places have been used and how many are left. That is the screen to look at when somebody says the link is not working — “no places left” is much the commonest reason.

Adding places later

You can raise the number on an existing invitation rather than issuing a second link, which means the link you already sent keeps working. For a customer who has come back for more, that is usually the kinder option.