Online Event Registration – ePly Services Newsletter

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.