Knowledgebase

TRANSCRIPT

StarChapter handles regular chapter meetings, networking events, professional development events, and certification prep courses, all through Meeting Manager. You’ll find it in the main menu under Meetings, right here.

To begin, we’ll add a meeting using the button at the top. Here’s where we’ll enter in our meeting name. And then we’ll pick our template. Templates will pre-fill certain information about this meeting. So if our meetings normally take place at the same time or at the same venue, or if we normally have the same costs for member and non-member registrations, a template can save us a lot of time. Instead of choosing from the existing ones, we may choose to create a new template based on this meeting we’re creating now. This really is the best option if we’re about to set up a more complicated event, like our annual golf tournament or our professional development day, and that’s what I’m going to choose for our meeting today.

On this screen, we’ll enter in the details. Our category will be a welcome session. Those categories are coming from the meeting settings, by the way. And then we’ll enter in the starting and ending dates and times. Let’s say that our welcome meetings are always on the second Tuesday of the month, and they run from five p.m. to eight thirty p.m. The registration cutoff date and time, that’s when our cutoff is for someone to register themselves on our system. Now, as admins we can always register someone on their behalf. We can even do it after the event is over. But to make sure that we have accurate headcounts for our venue or for a caterer, we may want to say that we’re not taking registrations any later than one day before the event. The late date and time is when the late fee kicks in. We may not be using these for all of our meetings. If we’re not, we can ignore these, they’re not going to do anything. We’ll say that a late fee kicks in if you’re any later than the seventh. In order to qualify for the early discount, you have to register no later than the first.

In the venue section, we can enter a new one-time only venue, or a new reusable venue, or choose from any venue that we’ve used in the past. It really is best, if we can get the address for the venue, to plug that in here. The information goes straight to Google Maps for driving directions.

On this screen, we enter the details about the event. The Excerpt is a short blurb to get someone’s attention and hopefully interest them in registering for this meeting. Down here in the description area, we may have our guest speaker’s bio, we may have detailed information about what we’re covering in this legislative update, or similar information. For now, I’m just going to say “Details to be announced.” We can always come back and edit this later on.

On this next screen, we have our tickets and products. The registration details at the top allow us to set some general preferences for this meeting. So we can choose for example, whether or not to allow people to redeem vouchers or coupons for discounted meeting registrations. We could also choose to disable registration for this event altogether. It may be that this isn’t our event, but it’s actually a regional event that we’re advertising to our members, and we’re not actually accepting the registrations. Or this may still be a save the date. We may not be ready to take registrations yet. In those cases, this box is what we’ll use.

If we offer continuing education credits for this meeting, we’ll check the box here. Each ticket will then have an option for a number of continuing education credits that’s associated with it. And then, after the meeting, it’s only those participants who actually attended the event, not those who just bought the ticket, who earn the credits. Max attendance here on the right is useful if we’re meeting at a small venue and we need to make sure that we don’t go above a certain number of registrations. And fixed fees are not something that very many organizations need, but we may choose to use this if we have to add on a processing charge.

Further down, we have our tickets and products. The difference between the two is that a ticket gives you a seat at the event and goes with a person, but a product is some kind of add-on that usually someone is purchasing in addition the meeting registration. So if this is our certification prep course, attendance at the course itself is a ticket, but a copy of the study guide that you may already have and might not need to purchase, is an optional product. Or a raffle ticket may be a product. Sponsorships can go either way. If our sponsorship does not include one or more registrations at the event, we’ll make that a product. If our sponsorship comes with one or more registrations, we’ll make that a ticket. It really does depend on our program.

Whichever way you go, it’s really important to have tickets set up for members and non-members (if you allow them) on every meeting that we create. Otherwise, the system doesn’t know who’s allowed to register or how much they need to pay. So those have to be there on every meeting. If we’re using a template, though, we’ll come to this screen and we’ll find that tickets have already been created and we may not have to do anything at all. Since we’re creating this from scratch, we’ll add a new ticket and we’ll start with a ticket for the member registrations. This ticket should be published. Our description will be “Member Registration.” Let’s say it’s thirty dollars. For something like a welcome meeting that we’re setting up now, this is probably not going to be a multi-seat ticket. But there are scenarios where this option can come in handy. If we were setting up our annual golf tournament, and we were allowing people to register their foursome, we would check this box, enter in four seats, and update the price accordingly. This gives the registrant four slots to fill in people’s names so that everyone has a badge and we get the proper head count on our meeting. This will also ensure that any ticket questions are asked for every registrant. We’ll see questions in a minute.

We don’t need to limit sales for this ticket. Further down, we can enter the dollar amount for the early bird discount and the late fee. We’re going to offer a five dollar earlybird discount, but no late fee. We do want to display this ticket on the meeting information page and in any emails we send out about this meeting. Here, we can add any appropriate questions for this ticket. Questions are for things we want to find out from the registrants, but that don’t affect the price of registration. So we may add a multiple choice question and say, “Please select your meal.” This question should probably be required. We can also enter in blank question. We may ask, “Do you have any questions for our guest speaker?” or if this is a non-member ticket, we may ask, “How did you hear about us?”

Down here, we can restrict the purchase of this ticket. Since this is a member ticket, it’s automatically restricted so that only logged-in members can buy it. However, we may have a different situation. We may be putting in a student ticket that only logged-in student members can buy. Or this might be a non-member ticket that only a member can buy on behalf of a non-member colleague or their spouse, that they may be bringing to the meeting. So the restrictions offer us these different options and these items in the drop-down are coming from Membership in Group Manager. So what you have in your system may not match what you see on this demonstration.

If we’ve got our ticket set appropriately, we’ll add it on, and then we’ll add one more for non-member registrations. The third option that you see here, the corporate ticket, is not generally used although it can come in handy if you have a corporate membership. We won’t be going through that today, but if you do have questions on it, feel free to contact us by entering a support ticket.

For our non-member ticket, we’ll call that “Non-Member Registration,” and it should probably be a bit higher than the member ticket price. We’ll offer a similar early bird discount and a late fee. And the same question. With the questions, for something like a meal choice, if it’s the same question for both the member ticket and the non-member ticket, we’ll want to make sure that the question text matches exactly. That’s going to ensure that the answers from the members and the non-members appear in the same area in our reporting. It just makes things a little bit easier. As with the member ticket, we can restrict the purchase, but we don’t need to do that, we’ll just add this ticket on.

In the Catalog Products section, we can attach a product that we’ve already created through the Store section. We’ll skip that for today.

On the next screen, we can load up a meeting icon. This really helps with making our meeting page look good, so it’s best to load something up if we have it. In the Documents section, we can load up anything of interest. This may be our guest speaker’s bio, it may be a waiver for a plant tour, or it may be a copy of the meeting minutes after the meeting has taken place. Just like with the tickets, we have options to restrict who’s allowed to access this document. On the final All Done screen, we get a recap of everything we’ve done. This meeting is unpublished right now, and it’s not going to appear on our home page or on any other page on our system. I think I’m ready, so I’ll publish it now. We also want to set this meeting to show in our meeting list modules. We may or may not have one of these. These are sections normally appearing on the home page, or maybe on all pages, that list brief details of a couple of upcoming meetings. It’s a good way to get a bit more attention for an important meeting that’s coming up.

A bit lower on the screen, we have the option to save this meeting to a template. This means we can very quickly create new meetings based on this one. And if we do need to make edits, we have Edit options in each main area as we scroll down. Now I’m going to hop over to the front end to take a look at what our registrants will see. Since this is our very next upcoming meeting, we’re going to see it on the countdown on our home screen. Now, every organization does this a little bit differently. Not everyone uses a countdown, for example.

But we will always see this on our upcoming meetings page. We can view all of the details, not that we have many right now, or we can get driving directions. Ticketing details show on the right, and if we choose to register, we’ll be prompted to log in for members-only pricing. Or we can continue without a login. In this scenario, we would only be able to purchase those tickets that are available for non-members to buy. And that’s it for the meeting setup. We do recommend, if this is one of the first meetings you’re creating, that you do a test registration before announcing this to your membership. Make sure that you get all the way through the process, and that everything looks good. After that, you’re all clear to email this meeting out to your member and non-member contacts.   

Please check out our videos on our communications tools within the knowledgebase for more information on that.