Registration tools allow the user to register and pay for various sorts of events and fees, including meetings, seminars, shows, conferences, courses, and exams.
The registration process can involve numerous steps, including:
In version 4, all registrations follow a ticketing model. "Registering" just means "purchasing a ticket". A ticket may or may not correspond to an actual printed pass, but even if there is no printed ticket, the registration system still treats it as if there was one. Events with limited seating will have one ticket per seat available; when all of them are sold, there are simply no tickets left to purchase. Tickets may or may not correspond to actual seats.
Each fee can be thought of as a registration type, with its own rules for how to register. Fees define:
You might need to set up different registration types if there are different types of attendees or participants in your event. For examples, delegates, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests each might require their own fee so that you can set each of them up with different rules.
Note that a single fee can have multiple price points, so you do not need to create separate fees just because the cost is different for members, non-members, late registrations, etc. See pricing, below.
To manage your fees, go to the fees tool under your event. Select a fee to work on it, or click the + New Fee button to create a new fee.
When you first setup a fee, you will be asked to set:
You can customize the fee further using the configure tool after you have created it. Other special configurations you may be interested in:
Manage your fee prices using the pricing tool under Sales. Add as many prices/condititions as necessary.
If you specify a price description, that will be included on the receipt. You can use this to specify things like "late fee", "member price", etc.
To categorize sales differently on your financial reports, set a special sales type on the price. If you set nothing, it will be categorized as a normal event registration.
Prices are selected automatically. A user will get the lowest price available at that time for their access level. If you need to override those rules, you can also set the price status to "priority" and it will be selected before regular prices regardless of the actual cost. Admins entering registrations from the control panel can choose which price point they are registering at.
Fees are normally contained within an event, which can be set up using your Event Calendar tools. But in principle, fees could also be set up in other things that accept registrations, such as courses or trips.
In the case of regular events, you can set up your basic event using the Event Calendar, which provides a registration tool to jump to the Registration module.
The registration module will display all events with registration on its opening screen. You can use the "all events" button to find events without registration, if you have not set up the registration yet.
You can also quickly set up events by copying previous events. This is quick and easy if the new event follows the same format as the old. You only need to specify the new event name and date; all other dates and schedules will be moved to match. After the copy is done, you can edit or reconfigure the new event and fees as needed.
When a registration occurs, a ticket is issued in the registrant's name. Every fee has a ticket inventory that is sold from; once the inventory is sold out, no more can be sold. The ticketing method determines how the ticket inventory is managed.
The ticketing method can be set in the fee's configuration screen.
Ticket purchases are made from the available inventory of tickets.
With automatic ticketing, the inventory is automatically expanded as tickets are requested. This is the default, and is convenient for open-ended registrations with no preset limits.
GA (General Admission) tickets have a fixed inventory, and the registrant can only purchase tickets if there are enough remaining in the inventory to satisfy their request. This is useful for managing overall event registration limits, since the available GA ticket inventory fixes the total number of registrations that can be accepted, no matter how many different fees you have. GA tickets are stored in the event, and can be drawn from by any fee in the event that uses GA ticketing. Once a GA ticket is purchased, it moves out of the GA ticket inventory, and into the particular fee that it was purchased from.
Special tickets are restricted to their particular fee. Like GA tickets, they also have a fixed inventory, and the registrant can only purchase tickets if there are enough remaining in the inventory to satisfy their request. Special tickets are stored under their fee. This is useful for limiting the number of registrants of a certain type, or for implementing limited-quantity discounts.
Note that if you have 100 GA tickets, and a special fee with 15 extra tickets, then the total event capacity could be up to 115. Plan your ticket inventories accordingly.
Use the ticketing tool in the event to view and manage GA tickets. Use the ticketing tool in the fee to view and manage special tickets.
When viewing ticket inventories, they are divided into three categories: sold, available, and not available, with a further breakdown for specific ticketing statuses. Use the small help icons for more information.
You have the following options for managing your ticket inventory of pre-generated tickets:
The Ticket limit setting affects how tickets are assigned to registrants. If you do nothing, or set the limit to 1 (which is the default), then purchasers can only buy one ticket at a time. Each ticket goes under a different name, and has a different registration form response connected to it. This is useful for events where individual registrations are personalized. For example, conferences may have name badges or banquets may have dietary options.
If you set a ticket limit > 1, then a purchaser can buy multiple tickets in a single transaction, and they will all go under the same name, with the same registration form information. This is useful for events like concerts where you just need to track the number of seats sold, and don't need to know who the individual seat holders are.
Tickets can have different statuses, depending where they are in the sales process:
To manually force the ticket to a certain status, click on the ticket # in the roster, and then open the Update Ticket pane. You can set the status to confirmed, reserved, waitlist, for valid registrations, or to canceled if you want to cancel the registration and resell the ticket.
To transfer a ticket to a different registrant, find the ticket # in the roster, and click on it. Then select the "Update Ticket" pane.
You can change the name on the ticket here, as well as move it to a different account holder. (This does not actually bill the new account holder for the ticket, it only says that the new account holder is now the "owner" of this ticket.)
The ticket status can also be updated at this time, if necessary. For example, if you are accepting a waitlist registration, you can update the status from "waitlist" to "reserved".
If there are any outcomes that need to be tracked, those can be recorded on the ticket itself, after the event is done.
Use the results tool to view and enter results. (You can also get to the results form from the roster; click on the ticket #, then on the results pane.)
Basic attendance can be recorded using the present/not present settings. Course outcomes or credits can be assessed using the pass/fail settings. Additional details such as scores or grades can be recorded in the details field.
To view the outcomes for all attendees, use the results tool, or include results when viewing the roster.
If you require strict tracking of outcomes, then your registrants must login to a personal account before registering so that the ticket and outcome are connected to a specific identity. Set your fee access to users or members to force registrants to log in first.
The roster is a list of all your registrations. Use the roster options button to add/remove information from your roster:
Export buttons at the bottom let you export your roster data in different formats.
Use the following links in the roster to access more specific information:
E-mails can be sent to your registrants automatically. There are two types of e-mails that you can set up:
Normally you can only set up one notification per fee, activity, or main event; any additional emails you create have to be scheduled. You can set up any number of scheduled emails. Note that scheduled emails are sent out daily, usually early in the morning. That means it is usually too late to schedule them to go out today; the soonest they will go out is overnight.
Registration e-mails can include the following merge codes:
Otherwise, your emails are managed using the Emails module. Consult the documentation there for details.
Registration forms are optional. The ticketing system will automatically collect a name for the ticket, and the e-commerce system will collect full contact information for the purchaser. In many cases, that is sufficient.
If you need to collect more information about your registrants, you can use the Forms module to create a registration form. There are 2 types of registration form you can set up:
Once a form has been set up, you can manage it like any other form using the Forms module. Note that shared forms are located in the event, while special forms are located in their specific fees.
You can put any questions you want onto a registration form, but you should always make sure to include name fields, so that the ticket and roster can track who it was sold to. Use questions named first_name and last_name to track the ticket holder. You can also use just name, company, or organization if you don't want to ask for first_name or last_name. If you do not include any fields like these, the roster won't be able to report a name for who the ticket was sold to; the ticket name will simply be blank.
You do not need to collect detailed contact information for the registrant, since that information is already collected at checkout (and for existing users/members is already on file). But if you do collect contact info, use the following question names to help the e-commerce system recognize fields that might be useful for populating a billing address: address, city, provstate, pcode, phone, email.
Even if you don't collect detailed contact information on each registrant, asking for the registrant's email is still useful if you intend to make use of the communications features of the registration system.
To view all your attendees, use the roster. The roster can be customized to include contact info, registration form info, and activity participation info, as needed.
To view your ticket sales overview, including both sold and unsold tickets, use the ticketing tool.
To view your sales income, using the revenues tool. This includes a complete review of your sales, as well as a summary view with subtotals by fee. It links to individual invoices, as well as account statements.
To view (and enter) results, use the results tool. To export results, use the roster, and include results in the roster options.