|  Friday's Doubleknot News - Vol. 146
1/3/2014
BEST PRACTICE: Effective Event Registration Forms
The following are best practices for event registration forms that will help ensure a seamless experience for registration owners at your site: - To make the registration process less cumbersome, use as few forms as possible and ask as few questions as possible.
- Before you start building forms, decide what kind of information you need to collect and whether it should be located on a per-registrant form or on a group form. For example, personal information about each registrant should be located on a per-registrant form, but information that applies to the group, such as orders for optional merchandise, should be on the group form.
- Don’t ask for any information in forms that you can collect using registrant attributes. For example, registrant first name, last name, email address, birthday, and other information can be easily collected using registrant attributes and should not be included on a form.
- Make sure that you aren’t requesting duplicate information. For example, if you’re using a form for each named registrant, the registration owner will already have entered each participant’s name, and the forms will be associated with the correct registrants, so you don’t need to ask for the registrant’s name again in the form.
- Always test the program registration thoroughly to make sure that the forms function correctly before taking the sessions out of Test Mode.
TIME SAVER: Copy Similar Programs Instead of Creating New Ones If your organization will be offering programs that are similar to last year’s, Doubleknot makes it easy to copy the existing program so that you don’t have to set up the program configuration from scratch. For example, if you’re offering a summer daycamp next year that’s essentially identical to the daycamp you offered this year, you can save time by simply copying the existing program and adjust the dates and information as needed. To copy a program, follow these steps: - At the Manage a Program page, click Copy Program. A dialog box will be displayed.
- In the New Description field, enter the name of the new program.
- Click Copy. The copy of the program will be created and the Manage a Program page will be displayed.
The new copy of the program will contain one session and all of the session event groups and events. The dates of the session and the session events will be the same as the original. You must update the activity dates and times and the registration dates and times for both the session and the session events. When the session dates/times and session event dates/times are updated for the new program, you should create the second and following sessions. And, as always, be sure to fully test every element of the copied program to make sure that it’s correct. |
