Planning an event means staying on top of many moving pieces, from conception to post-event communications and transactions. This requires corporate event planners to be organized, efficient, and detail-oriented. However, even the best planners with the most experience can struggle with the challenge of keeping up with attendee registration management and everything in between. Hiring a corporate event management company to take care of registration for you has more benefits than you may realize, from expertly building strategic registration sites, apps, and reporting to reconciliation and post-program surveys. This positions planners to create more dynamic events with greater effectiveness and panache, without having to focus on the minutiae that can easily become a full-time job.
Still not convinced registration and attendee management is worth being a line item in your event budget? Here are five ways that event organizers gain more from this service:
1. Expertise on the Registration Process
While it is tempting to rush into the registration process to get your event planning underway, experts on the registration process know that taking the time to ask important questions up front is necessary to avoid extra work and hurdles later. Determining how many attendee types there are, if attendees will need to give their t-shirt size, and what attendee type will attend certain breakouts are just a few examples of the kind of information needed to build and execute a seamless registration process.
Having this forward-thinking approach in the beginning will determine the number of attendee paths that are needed to build and the information that each type of attendee may access via the mobile app.
2. Making Strategic Platform Decisions
Not only is it advantageous to have experts that understand the registration process forwards and backwards, but also know the right platforms, functionality, and partners to use to build it out. Registration and event tech experts know and understand various kinds of registration and app building platforms, the pros and cons of each, and how to make the appropriate recommendations for a clients’ digital landscape based on event goals, the kinds of attendee data to organize and capture, as well as the aesthetic for the end user. With this experience and knowledge, event organizers can work smarter instead of harder with a strategic registration event tech stack catered to their needs.
3. Reporting
Pulling quick reports of data in real-time is an important aspect of registration and attendee management services. Knowing how many attendees need to arrive early to an event, and how many need to stay late goes hand in hand with room blocks for hotels. Not to mention the constant changes that happen leading up to an event from the moment registration opens is one small piece of the overall management that can become a full-time job. Having a dedicated team of registration and attendee management experts allows event organizers the freedom to take a step back and plan the many other components of a program that are just as crucial.
4. Rooming List Management
Ensuring all your attendees have lodging is a critical step in planning and requires effective communication and attention to detail. This entails site visits to properties, negotiating contracts with a hotel, identifying the room types, number of rooms, and room rates. As you can imagine, this takes a substantial amount of time and is ongoing with the number of changes that can occur leading up to an event, making registration an event service worth hiring.
5. Inbox Management
Managing the event registration inbox is an important part of event planning, however tedious and time-consuming it might be. Every time an attendee makes a change, or has a question, this is the inbox that those messages go to, and a timely response is crucial for a positive attendee experience. Coordinators can easily spend an entire eight-hour workday managing the event registration inbox and responding to changes and questions.
With an event solutions team managing the inbox for you, you’ll have the free time to strategize and oversee the entire event, including bigger-picture elements like the messaging and content, production set design, menus, creative branding and signage, and speaker rehearsals.
6. On-site Registration Staff
During the operation of the program, registration staff comes with you on site to ensure that all runs smoothly from arrival day to departure day. Answering questions and ensuring everyone knows where to go and how to access and use the app for pertinent information about the agenda, hotel map, ground transportation, and breakouts is what your registration team is there for. These people are professional travel directors with extensive experience and unreasonable hospitality when it comes to running events of all types and sizes. Being intricately connected to your travel partner, registration personnel on site can help direct attendees with travel delays to get the help they need to adjust their flights and any other travel accommodations.
Although you may be able to handle registration for an event on your own, enlisting an event tech expert that has run registration thousands of times across a variety of event portfolios comes with its advantages, not to mention strategy and approaches to attendee management that you might not think of. Hiring this expertise can make the difference between smooth and efficient attendee experiences versus a logistical nightmare taking an immense amount of time and energy that event organizers don’t have. Because this only scratches the surface of what registration services can do for your event, registration and attendee management will be the best money spent in your event budget!
Interested in attendee management and registrations? Check out Unbridled’s full suite of services.
If you’d like to learn what our team can do for you, get in touch with us.
