SUMMARY

Washington State University’s extension office needed to reduce workload and increase attendee satisfaction at its Area Health Education department events without hiring additional staff or committing to an expensive contracted registration provider. The organization turned to RegOnline to automate its registration process, saving more than 400 staff hours annually, reducing cost and preventing attendee confusion and complaints.

CHALLENGE

Area Health Education (AHE) coordinates five conferences each year, within seven weeks of each other. The registration process for all 350 attendees at each conference was extremely manual. First registration forms would flow in by mail, fax, or over the phone and someone would enter that information into a database. Then another employee would call in credit card payments over the phone for approval. Finally confirmation letters would be printed through a mail merge process and mailed.

This process took too long. Registration forms quickly piled up, and mistakes were common. At the events AHE faced frustrated attendees at onsite check-in. With similar events being held in the same location on the same day, attendees were showing up at the wrong conference, and with no way to look up attendees over multiple events, event staff became quickly frustrated and overwhelmed.

AHE needed a better solution, but it had one more problem: Since events are only one piece of its business it needed a program that would be easy use and a program that did not require a contract or complicated pricing.

SOLUTION

Washington State University and AHE decided to go with a web-based, event registration system to solve its problems. It turned to RegOnline to do four things:

1. Automate event registration online: AHE provided an online event registration option for the first time in 2008, allowing both exhibitors and attendees to register, set preferences and pay online.

1. Accept payments online: AHE works with five different clients each with their own bank account. If the registration payments were paid directly to the University system they could be delayed in getting to the right accounts. To avoid that, the organization had RegOnline accept payments for them and send checks directly to the extension office each month.

1. Provide accurate, real-time reporting: AHE used RegOnline to provide accurate reporting to better track customers at every event. Through this function, they provided event organizers with access to real-time customer data at events, compared events using cross-event reporting and distributed up-to-the-minute information via a web link to vendors, committee members and staff.

1. Provide web-based platform without obligation: AHE used RegOnline’s standard, pay-as-you-go agreement to avoid long-term contracts and complicated pricing structure, allowing the organization to implement the system immediately.

RESULTS

After its first event on RegOnline, AHE found that 50% of exhibitors and attendees had used the online registration option. That automation reduced workload by an estimated 14 minutes per registration or an astounding 408 hours of annual staff time.

In addition to the time saved during the registration process AHE no longer has confused attendees waiting in line onsite. AHE was able to quickly access registration data across multiple events and easily confirm that attendees were paid in full.

The reporting functions enabled AHE to quickly access results for each conference and compare events with cross-event reporting. Real-time, “smart link” reports provided new visibility into performance for committee members and staff.