Event registrations for both members and non-members need to be quick, easy, and allow you to gather the information you need to host a great event. In this video, we’re going to dig into the features that create an effective registration experience. We’ll look at how registrations appear on your site, what information you can capture during registration, and the registration process, which includes payments and email notifications.

Here I’m looking at my leadership conference, which is an example of an event on your website. It’s just a feature that’s embedded, and the event is managed in the backend of MBI, but it appears on your site. The registration section is located here. One of our most popular features you’ll see is member and non-member pricing. The member price requires a login to register. The member rate is a lot lower than the non-member rate, which creates an exclusive member price. It’s a value-added benefit to being a member and a great benefit that you can promote. Non-members can see it’s a little costly, but that’s good for them to be able to see and compare the price, which may open the door for them to become a member. They could even sign up right now, get that login set up, and start paying a lower cost to register for your event.

There are other advanced pricing capabilities. For example, the platinum-level member allows you to price out certain items for your registration based on membership level. You can take it a step further, not just being members, but being a specific status or group of members such as platinum in this example. Other options include early bird pricing, which is a discounted rate for registering early, and the ability to automatically display a regular price when it is a specific date and time. You can set that up once, and it will do it automatically. Another one is bundle pricing, which allows you to combine a number of items into one discounted bundle, so it’s actually cheaper to buy the bundle than to buy all the items separately. We dive into those other advanced pricing capabilities in their own separate videos for these pricing features, so definitely check those out if you want to dive into them a little bit more.

Now, just to show an example of registering: if I go to the conference delegate item as a non-member and choose a quantity of two, I’m now able to capture who the attendee is, including their first name, last name, and email. This is handy because the person registering might not always be the one attending your event, and you want to know who’s going to show up at the door. If that is the case, you can enter their name and email. The reason we capture those three fields is that MBI always attaches this to a unique person for better data capturing. If it’s someone who already exists in the system, it’s going to be able to find them and match them. Their participation history for your events will show this event on there as well. If they are brand new and have never existed in the system, it will create that record for them so you can start capturing how they’ve been participating and engaging with your organization.

You can also capture additional information. As you see here, I have t-shirt size, name to display on the name tag, and wheelchair accessibility. Those are custom fields that you can capture in addition to their registration. You want to know some more information. In this case, t-shirt size. There’s also a name to display on the name tag, which is an open-ended text field that I can input into here. You can capture as many different fields as you want. As you see with the second attendee, you capture the same information, so you’re always going to be capturing the exact same details that you need for every single attendee.

When it comes down to payment processing, once I click proceed, the purchaser can be different from who is registering. They can always enter who that person is if they are the one being billed. Payments can go through your payment processor. There are eight different gateways that we integrate with, and most of them support the ability for the member to store their card. That’s great because it’s an easy one-click checkout. When they purchase an event registration, they can just choose to “use card,” so it’s very simple for them to do. It’s 100% optional, so the member can choose whether they want to store it or not. It can also be used for automated membership renewal, so it’s not only for events but can also be used for a quicker renewal. MBI does not take a cut on any transactions or any additional fees. Whatever your payment processor charges, that’s the only fee you have to worry about.

Once payment is processed, there are a series of automated communications that occur. Once they register, pay for the registration, and proceed, a confirmation email is sent to the registrant. That would include the details of their registration, who to contact if they have questions, and some more information about the event itself. Like everything in MBI, you can fully customize the email template to make it unique per event so it’s not the same all across the board. On that note, you also receive a notification as a staff or team member to let you know about the new registration that occurred so you can keep track of that. You can also delegate certain people within your team with an email address to send them a notification as well. The registration will immediately appear in your event, so when you view it in the backend and review the performance of your event, you’re able to view how many registrations you have, and that will automatically be updated within the event itself.

Lastly, when it comes to reporting, there are built-in reports in MBI. You can pull a list of your registrants and a list of who is attending an event summary, so you can see the total information on how many t-shirt sizes you have, for example, those kinds of things. There’s even financial reporting to know who hasn’t paid, who has paid, who’s outstanding, and those kinds of things. So we do have reports to handle all of that. We do explore more of those event reports in a dedicated video, so definitely check that out. But nonetheless, that is pretty much the process to gather registrations on your website. If you have questions, definitely reach out, and we’ll be happy to help.