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Public events are the largest single source of contacts in most organisations. Anyone who registers for one without an Orgo account becomes a contact, automatically, and from that point on they are a person in your records rather than a line on a ticket list. Built for organisers running open events, who end up with an audience far wider than their membership and need it to land somewhere useful. Replaces the exported attendee spreadsheet that nobody ever reconciles with the member database.

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What happens when someone with no account registers

Every registration path that does not come from a signed-in member does the same three things with the email address entered on the form.
1

Match it against your members

If a member of your organisation already uses that email, the registration is attached to their member account and no contact is created.
2

Match it against your contacts

If no member matches but a contact does, that existing contact is reused. The registration joins the event history already on the record.
3

Create a contact

If neither matches, a new contact is created with its Source set to Event, carrying the name, email and whatever else the registration form asked for.
This runs on the free registration form, on paid ticket checkout, on the payment and invoice paths that complete a purchase later, on the External tab of the organiser’s Invite dialog, and on the “fill in your details” link sent with a ticket bought on someone else’s behalf.
There is no setting that turns this off. Contact creation from event registration happens whether or not the contacts module is switched on. The module switch controls the contacts screens, not what gets recorded.
What decides whether a non-member can reach the registration form at all is the event itself: it has to be published with its Audience set to Public. See Public event page for that page and Create event for where Audience lives. Registrations created this way land on registration status Registered and RSVP Attending.

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Which statuses let a contact in

A contact’s registration carries the same statuses a member’s does, described in full on Event attendance. What matters here is that three gates read those statuses and they do not agree.
An attendee waiting on an unpaid invoice can sign in to the Event App and open the event through the link in their email, but the event does not appear on their own My events list and they cannot see or cast event votes. If someone says the app works but the event has vanished from their list, check for an unsettled invoice before anything else.

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The Event App for a contact

A contact has no password, so they sign in with a code sent to their email address: six digits, valid for five minutes, reaching the Event App and nothing else in Orgo. The limits, and the alternative route through the link in their confirmation email, are on Event App. Inside, a contact is a full participant on almost every surface. Connections are member to member. The Connect button creates a lasting relationship in your member network, so it is not offered to a contact and a contact cannot receive one either. The equivalent for them is the 1:1 meeting, which works in both directions between any two attendees regardless of kind. See Event App networking. One more gap: the notification for a new feed post goes to member attendees only. Contacts see the post when they next open the Feed, but are not told about it.

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Privacy in the attendee directory

The defaults are the opposite of what most people assume, and they differ by kind of attendee. A contact never signed up for a profile and never agreed to share their details, so their card appears but the details on it stay withheld until they turn them on in the Event App Profile tab. A member’s phone and email are shown unless they set them private themselves. Two rules apply to everyone: an attendee with no email address on file gets no card at all, for every viewer including organisers; and organisers see the full roster with phone and email unmasked, whatever each person chose.

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Badges and check-in

There is no separate badge record. The badge is the registration, carried as a QR code that appears on the emailed PDF ticket, on the event page and on the Badge button in the Event App. Contacts get one exactly as members do. Scanning it at the door and confirming checks the attendee in, which sets their RSVP to Attended. The scanner card marks a contact as an external registration and shows no profile photo, but the flow is identical.
The code is the credential. For a contact it is also their way into the Event App, so anyone holding their ticket QR effectively holds their event session. Cancelling the registration invalidates it.
Full detail, including which permission each scanner needs, is on QR check-in.

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Where the history lives

Open a contact and scroll to the Events card: the events that contact attended, past events first, with the empty state “No events for this profile”. The same registrations show on the event side in Participants and in the attendee CSV export, which includes contacts alongside members. If the contact later becomes a member, the history follows them. Both routes re-point the existing registrations at the new member account rather than recreating them, so ticket numbers, QR codes, statuses, payments, custom field answers and add-ons all survive:
  • Creating a member account on the same email address moves the registrations across at the moment the account is created.
  • Merging the contact into a member moves them as part of the merge. Where both sides attended the same event, the merge keeps one registration and records the pre-merge values of both, so it can be rolled back.
See Becoming a member for the difference between those two routes, which is larger than it looks.

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Behaviour to know about

Three behaviours surprise people regularly. None is a setting you can change. A second ticket on the same email creates a second, emailless contact. Registering again on an email that already holds an active registration for that event creates a fresh contact with no email address, so the second ticket carries its own registration answers instead of overwriting the first person’s. That contact is a real row in your contacts list, cannot be emailed, can never sign in to the Event App (the code has nowhere to go), and does not appear in the attendee directory. On the free registration path this also leaves an existing member account unlinked, so the second ticket is a contact even when the email belongs to a member. The first registration is unaffected, and filling in a different email per attendee at checkout avoids it entirely. An attendee with no email address is left out of the directory. However the registration was created, no email means no card, for organisers as well as attendees. The “Event attendees” newsletter audience only reaches subscribed contacts. It filters contacts down to those whose newsletter subscription is on, and registration sets that only when the person ticked the newsletter box. So a contact created by an event registration is, by default, outside the audience named after the event they attended. Members usually are inside it, because most organisations default members to subscribed. Check the recipient count against the participant count before sending, and see Contacts and the newsletter.

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Troubleshooting

In this order. Does the email on their registration match the one they are typing? A typo at registration is invisible until this moment. Is their status one that grants access, and not cancelled? Pending approval and Waiting list do not open the app. Does the registration have an email address at all? A second ticket bought on an email that already had one produces an emailless contact that can never sign in; add the address to that contact, or cancel the row and re-register the person. Note that the code screen answers the same way for unknown and known addresses, so silence proves nothing: confirm the address against Participants rather than by retrying.
Four causes, worth checking in this order. The registration has no email address, which removes them for everyone including you. Their status does not grant access. They turned profile visibility off in the Event App Profile tab, in which case you still see them as an organiser and other attendees do not. Or they are listed but hard to find: the directory is ordered by surname and contacts have no separate surname, so they gather at one end of the list. Search by name instead of scrolling.
Expected when the second registration used an email that already held an active one for that event. The second contact is created without an email address on purpose, so the two tickets keep separate answers. Both are valid and both scan at the door. In the contacts list, the emailless row is the extra ticket: add the real address to it if that person needs the Event App and a directory card, or merge it away if it was a duplicate you did not want.
The Event attendees audience includes a contact only if their newsletter subscription is on, and registration turns it on only when the attendee ticked the newsletter box. Open the contact and check the newsletter card. To reach everyone who registered regardless of subscription, use the event’s own messages rather than a newsletter campaign, remembering that consent still applies to anything promotional.