This part of our series covering conference registration software will focus on perhaps the most critical component of any event software system – the reporting.
Event Planning Report Tools
Your reporting tools should not just be for producing Excel spreadsheets. The event planning report tools should help make your life easier when it comes to planning any conference or event. For example, first-rate conference registration software features include:
Label creation – there are a lot of different uses for registrant labels. First of all, you should easily be able to create labels for mailing of letters and literature. For onsite registration, labels can help you not only organize the packets you will distribute as people sign in, but you can also use “smart” labels to identify what should go into packets, such as ribbons. If you need to mail invoices (especially when you have a large government component), the tools should create invoices for unpaid registrants. In all these label event planning reports you should be able to easily specify the target audience, filtering out the people you do not want to label, such as exhibitors.
Letters – can you print letters to registrants from your conference registration software report? World class conference registration software lets you generate customized letters with rich formatting, images and so forth (it probably uses the same editor as you use for your email blasts!). If you can do that, you will save a lot of time. Beats doing a manual Microsoft Word mail merge!
Sign-in sheets – if you track attendance at your workshops, your conference registration software should be able to generate sign-in sheets with the names of who signed up in advance.
Participant lists – if your conference registration software doesn’t generate attractive participant lists, you are missing out and probably spending a lot of extra time doing this manually. You should be able to decide which fields go on the list, font size, row/column dimensions and, most importantly, who goes on the list. You should be able to do this for conference attendees, workshop participants and so forth. The report should generate a PDF that you can either print or mail to the appropriate people.
Corrections – with first-rate conference registration software you should be able to take the results of your reports and directly edit the records. This is especially useful for tweaking data that will be used on badges, public reports, etc.
Generate badges – you should be able to take just those participants listed in your report and print badges. This is especially useful if you have a group of people who get custom badges such as exhibitors, speakers and VIPs.
Email blasts – you should also be able to designate a specific group of participants and email them directly. This is targeted email marketing at its finest!
Do You Have Good Conference Registration Software?
In our previous postings we have reviewed the right technology for your conference. We mentioned that the best conference registration software should have all of these elements (where applicable):
- Online Registration with Conditional Logic
- Flexible Pricing and Discounting
- Membership database links
- Self-Service registration
- Transaction Based Accounting
- Exhibitor Management
- E-Marketing
- Real-time Custom Reports
- Onsite Registration
- Post-conference surveys
You do not want to lose money and increase costs by using inadequate conference registration software. Unless your reporting tool has these and other features you may be losing out!
Still think you may not have the right registration software? Event Rebels has the online registration software for you.
Look out for our next post, where we will continue our series with a further look at the event planning reports you need and everything they can do to make life onsite easy.
