What tools do you use for Event Registration?

[cindyNapTime]

Hi, we are a smallish non-profit that organizes parenting events in our community.  We need the ability to allow members (contacts) to pay for these events.  What type of tools does your organization use for this (besides Excel spreadsheets, our current method!)?  Ideally, we'd be able to track what events a contact attended.  Love to hear your ideas!  Thanks.  - Cindy

[aebimoyo]

Hello

You don't say what your current method of managing payments is or what version of salesforce you're using - the non-profit or enterprise edition, but they're very similar. 

Salesforce is great at handling event bookings. And in fact it's about to become even better.

Campaigns are good for managing events - the campaign itself is the event, so this is where you record details of the location, time, etc. And then campaign members are people who've booked to attend. Or if you work this way, they can be people you've invited and you're waiting for them to RSVP as well.

You need to set up member statuses to reflect the way you work. So for example, if people just come to you to book an event, your member statuses might be:

Booked

Attended

Did not attend

So you can record how many people are booked to attend your event, how many actually showed up and how many didn't. 

With the new release of salesforce, you can now also record things specific to each campaign member such as dietary preference, accessibility requirements and, of course, whether they've paid or not. 

So I would use campaigns. 

Does this help?

[cindyNapTime]

Yes!  That helps!!!  Although, I guess it gets a bit more complicated... we are hoping to allow members to register for events on our website, and that info would get sent to (uploaded to) salesforce.  I don't suppose that's a web-to-lead feature?  Perhaps there is a "web-to-campaign-member"?  I'll look into that.  BTW, our current method is completely off-line - sending emails, payment by check via snail-mail.  To further complicate things, we also have attendees who are NOT members (contacts).  Thanks very much, you've given me a starting point.

[aebimoyo]

Yes that is a bit more complicated. However, you can use a web to lead form (there's no web to campaign :-( sadly).

However, you'd then have to convert all the leads to contacts and add them to the campaign (or you can add leads to campaigns, but I'm guessing you'd want to have all the people as contacts as they're easier to manage).

Depends on how many people you're expecting to book - I've just done a system for a non-profit in the UK that runs monthly events with over 150 attending. They fill up very fast and to have to convert 150 leads in the space of a few hours was too much for them. So we created an automated system. 

It is possible (and probably preferable) to integrate website bookings directly into salesforce but it takes quite a bit of coding and testing and I'm guessing you don't have the budget for that?

If you'd like to 'talk' more about the solution we used in the UK, drop me an email: nicole@qvrglobal.com.au 

Low budget solutions a speciality!

Thanks

nicole