Considering how you can increase the effectiveness of your company which organize training courses or conferences, sooner or later you will encounter the issue regarding the use of online event registration software that support the organization of various events. There are local and foreign solutions available on the market, both operating online and intended to be installed on an available server.
In general, all systems are designed to facilitate the work of event organizers. If you have doubts about whether you need such a solution in your business, here are the 5 main reasons why you should use online event registration system.
Time savings
You can formulate the title differently – money savings. A well-designed event registration system will save a lot of your time (or your staff) to do the tedious work. It will introduce standardization and automation wherever possible. By freeing yourself from the need for manual actions, you will gain time for sales or marketing activities that can bring you tangible results. If you are exhausted in your work, you will gain time to rest.
We don’t need to expand this thread – instead of manually sending confirmation of registration or payment etc., you can take care of the preparation of plans on how to acquire a new customer. You will replace routine passive activities by active sales activities. This argument is irrefutable.
Data safety
Long topic, but we will shorten it to the necessary minimum. The security of your clients’ personal data is a key issue especially in the context of the GDPR Regulation. In the event of data loss or leakage, you have to deal with unpleasant consequences. We won’t tell you about possible administrative penalties resulting from the regulation – rather, we’ll inform you about real, direct effects, such as:
- loss of customer database
- no access to current information (about participants, payments, etc.) about organized events
- loss of accounting documents
Storing files in the cloud (DropBox, Google Drive, etc.) is some indirect solution, but losing, stealing or accidentally sharing your computer with other people means that they will gain access to the information stored there. You can see that this solution can’t be considered safe.
If you don’t store files in the cloud, only on your computer, you risk losing data in the event of a hardware failure. No… you just can’t do that anymore.
Only storing data in a properly secured system will allow you to sleep peacefully. Software providers perform automatic, frequent backups of the database, so even in the case of hardware failure, data can be recovered. Access to information is secured by a password, and the protocol of connecting to the database – encrypted. These are modern technological solutions recommended in the GDPR Regulation.
Everything in one place
By using an online event registration software, all necessary information is in one place. By logging into the system, you can see the current status of affairs immediately: the number of registrations, received and potential payments from participants, etc. You can view transaction details regarding any participant, issue an invoice, send mailing to appropriate groups of attendees or to attendees with a selected status.
In one sentence – by using an online event registration system you automatically improve the management of your events.
Uptime and speed of the software
Being able to work anywhere and on any device connected to the internet is the undeniable advantage of online event registration systems. This provides incredible freedom in managing events regardless of time of day or latitude. In order to take full advantage of this possibility, however, the system must provide two things: an appropriate uptime (readiness of the application to work measured in percent) and an appropriate speed of the software.
The uptime of the application should not be lower than 98% but it isn’t really possible to maintain 100% for a long time. Even Google’s search engine is available “only” at 99.99%. If the event registration system is available above 99% of the time, then you can use it without any doubt. Usually, unavailability of the system results from planned technical breaks for software updates or implementation of new solutions, hence achieving 100% availability is simply not possible.
The second equally important factor is the speed of the application itself. A high value of the uptime parameter will not be worth much if the program is slow. If every action in the system is associated with a long wait for the response (eg connection to the database), it can “kill” the sense of using such an application.
In short, the application must be available and fast – on these two issues there can be no compromises. A system that meets these two conditions beats all programs traditionally installed on computers.
Access to modern solutions
An online event registration software developed according to the needs and suggestions of event organizers will offer you the opportunity to use functionalities not available in any other standard solutions. You will be able to work with the application developed according to the best practices on the market and adapted to the expectations of many different organizations.
What do we mean by that? Application developers aren’t living in a vacuum. We receive a lot of comments and suggestions from the users of our system. Software development is, therefore, our response to the needs of people and companies that run a business similar to yours. You often know better how the system should work, but sometimes you receive an unexpected feature, which turns out to be a great solution for you.
This is because the development of the system involves not only programmers but, above all, its end users. As a result, you get a tool that includes the know-how of many really smart people in the training industry. This is an extremely important added value that is worth remembering.