Cost Comparison: Manual vs Online Registration.

Whether you choose manual or online registration for your event, both methods
will carry certain although different costs and benefits. It is up to you to
decide which method works best for your event, but to help you with the decision
we have outlined some of the more common costs and benefits that you will
encounter with each method.
Manual Registration:

Manual registration means that people are faxing, mailing or phoning in their
registration. From this we can assume a fairly definite set of costs that will
be incurred in setting up and running a manual registration system:

Printing and mailing costs
Most events that handle registration manually have detailed information packages
and registration forms that need to be professionally printed and then mailed to
potential registrants. A large event can mean incurring significant printing
costs, especially for high quality packages. Postage costs for mailing these
packages can easily exceed the printing costs when you consider weight and size
alone. Factor in additional mailing costs if your customer base is international
and the tab keeps climbing.

Communications costs
Manual registration usually means lots of faxing and phoning: faxing
registration forms, receiving registration forms, phoning people to verify
information, taking calls for credit card numbers or phone registration or just
to answer questions. Again, the phone and fax charges are considerably more for
an international customer base. Don’t underestimate the costs for toner and fax
paper either.

Labour costs
Associated with all of the above costs are labour costs. Somebody has to send
the faxes and make and receive calls over the phone and mail out the packages.
Somebody else has to do all the data entry, manage the information and send out
confirmations. If these people are your own employees, then in addition to their
salary, you are also paying to manage them, for their office space and for their
payroll deductions.

Online Registration:

Online registration is often done through an external company that specializes
in online registration services. It is a more automated process with a different
set of costs to consider. Bear in mind that with the majority of events it is
unlikely that registration can be handled entirely through online registration
as some people may not have access to a computer or they may just prefer to use
more traditional methods. But if you do it right this can easily be minimized.

With online registration your cost is just the cost of using the service
provided by the online registration vendor. Generally, there are two ways a
vendor will charge for their services:

Setup and Administration fee
Here the vendor charges based upon the complexity of the service you need. So,
for example, you pay more depending on the number of replies; whether or not
there is an online payment option and how it works; security features that allow
people to log-in and register and then change their information at a later date
if necessary; the level of customization and branding involved; the size of your
event and, consequently, the amount of data to be managed in the database, etc.

Percentage-based fee
If an online registration vendor uses this method to charge for services it
means, in most cases, that they will take a percentage of the registration fee
for each participant registered in your event. For example, if you have 500
people at your event and each one pays $100 to attend the event, the online
registration vendor would take a percentage of the $100 for each of the 500
participants.

Check with your vendor to see which method they use and how they determine their
fees. Once you have established a relationship with your vendor then a lot of
the hard work is done. The vendor sets up the system for you and manages the
data and there is generally very little required from you in terms of
administration and time.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any
questions or comments about this article.

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