Everyone knows that planning events can be stressful. In order to make the process easier, you need to plan ahead and use event management software like etouches. Planning ahead will ensure that you are setting up your events to meet your ultimate goals. And it all starts with the registration process.
You need to step in your attendees' shoes when you are building your registration site to guarantee that they are not getting overwhelmed. Not to mention, you want to make sure that you are making the process easier for you later on! Take it from etouches, they know registration. Having their registration system, eReg, be the heart of the etouches product line, they really care about setting up their clients up for success. To help you get started with registration, etouches has come up with a few helpful hints to make the process as painless as possible.
Don't go overboard with categories and sub-categories
Adding categories and sub-categories are fantastic when creating your event. They allow you to completely customize the registration process for all your attendee types. It may be seem like a good idea to have 100 categories and 25 sub-categories in each at the beginning, but you will end up with way to many categories. If you have a ton of categories, keep in mind that you'll have to be even more organized in order to keep your sanity later on when reviewing reports, running badges and sending emails. This may be a situation where less is more.
Ask the right questions to collect the right information
Registration is the perfect time to get all the information you need from your attendees in one shot. It is vital to think of what data you will need to share with others later on when building your event. When you are coming up with the questions, become the attendee. Ask yourself: Why am I asking them? What will I do with the responses? These answers can be important at the end of your event when you need to get data and reports to various vendors. Think of all the people that could be counting on you to give them what they need (hotel, A/V, caterers, etc).
More emails can actually mean less information
Be sure to have a complete plan before sending a single email. You don't want to provide too much information, too little information or the same irrelevant details repeatedly; all these things will cause your attendees to ignore emails and possibly delete before opening. Create a schedule of the emails, even before opening the registration site, that are necessary to send with relevant content that people will want to read.
To become a success with registration you need to take the time to plan everything out. It is not something you can put together last minute; you need to invest time in making this process as easy as possible for your attendees. The tips above are only a few of the ways you can be successful with registration.
