Look Professional and Be More Productive with Online Registration

So you’ve decided to host an event. Maybe it’s for educational purposes, brand awareness, networking, or entertainment. Whatever the reason, you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to it, but you want to appear professional and minimize the time spent managing the event details. In the past, you’ve promoted your events via emails and phone calls. Maybe you’ve even sent out a registration form you created in Microsoft Word that attendees had to fill out and fax back.

Now you’re doing the same thing for your latest event. At first, you receive a few phone calls for additional information. Then the email responses start to arrive. You find yourself spending lots of time answering phone calls, returning messages, and playing phone tag. You receive faxes with the registration form filled out, but you can’t always read the person’s handwriting.

You’d like to pull all this information into a single spreadsheet, but you begin to realize the labor-intensive problem of tracking registrant details. You definitely don’t have the time to dedicate to this task.

Wouldn’t an online registration system solve the above problems and make you look professional at the same time?

An online registration system, like the new Event Marketing tool from Constant Contact, will allow you to capture registrant details 24/7 and handle credit card processing via PayPal. Online registration also removes the labor-intensive and time-consuming process of managing registrant details. Use a ready-made registration form, or design one that collects whatever registrant information you regard to be critical. Choose from a variety of themes for your registration form to give it great visual appeal that will make invited guests more excited about attending.

Whenever people ask me about planning an event, I always suggest keeping the registration form short and to the point. Only ask registrants relevant questions and avoid asking information you don’t need. If there are fees for my event, collect these during registration via PayPal. Collecting fees electronically avoids the security risks of managing and storing credit card numbers on your own computer. And, if you can get registrants to pay at the time of registration, you’re getting a firm commitment from those individuals that they will attend the event.

At any point during your event registration process, an online system will allow you to see where you are with attendance at a quick glance. You can view registrant details with just a few clicks, or export all registrant information and view it in Excel. You can easily check the progress of your event information in one central location.

Note that you can select an appropriate theme for your registration form, and if you do so, your theme will also be applied to your event homepage. But I’ll leave that step for a future blog post. Till next time ...