Knowledgebase

TRANSCRIPT

For most organizations, the key value that they provide to their members is in their meetings. This video will walk you through all of the components of setting up a meeting, from the general policies and preferences, to meeting creation, emailing meeting notices, handling registrations, and accessing reports.

To start, we’ll go over our policies and make sure that the meeting settings are appropriately set. Under Meetings, Settings is the last option. In Permissions, there are a few common items that most organizations may like to change. We always recommend preventing duplicate member registrations. A member can always buy another non-member ticket for a friend or colleague, if you allow it, but this option will prevent a member from accidentally registering themselves more than once for the same meeting. We can also allow or prevent members from purchasing tickets for other members. If your members tend to work at the same companies, for example, it might be good to have this box unchecked, so that members can freely register one another. We also may choose to allow members  to cancel their order and request a refund from the View My Order History page. Bear in mind, just because they request a refund doesn’t necessarily mean they get it. That’s going to be up to the discretion of our treasurer. We can also choose to default the registration status to no-show for all new registrations. This may sound a little funny, but when a registration comes in, it will be marked as either a no-show, or as attended. By marking all registrations as no-shows to begin with, we can click on the screen and mark each registrant as attended as they arrive. 

During that check-in process, we would also be collecting outstanding payments. So this really is an efficient way of handling any incoming registrations for the attendance data. Alternatively, if we have very few no-shows for each event, we may choose to leave this unchecked.

If we make any changes, we’ll click the Save button on the bottom right.

Next is the Categories and Templates section. If we have a lot of different types of meetings or professional events, we may wish to set up a few different categories. In our sample system, we have a Meeting category along with a Welcome Session. We can create any additional categories that we need using this option. This helps for administrative purposes and if we’re creating specialty pages—perhaps a page specifically for membership benefits—we might want to show our upcoming welcome sessions, but not other kinds of events on that page. Having a meeting category allows us to do that. We’ll be talking about event lists towards the end of today’s presentation, but for information on how to add content to your pages, please check out the related videos in our knowledgebase. The meeting templates are also a very powerful tool. These templates allow us to say that certain kinds of meetings, like our standard meetings, normally take place at the same time or at the same venue, or that they normally include the same fees for member and non-member registrations. When we create new meetings based on any of these selected templates, the new meeting will automatically fill in the times, the costs, and the venue information. These are especially useful for a large or more complicated event like an annual golf tournament or a professional development day.  We can add or update templates through here, but we also have the option to create a template based on a meeting that we’re creating now, and that’s what we’ll be demonstrating today.

We also have options for editing the templates used for generating the meeting badges. Usually, there wouldn’t be too many updates here. However, if we like, we can edit what’s present here. Perhaps, instead of showing the board office, we’d like to show whether someone is a member or a guest. The image here would be your organization’s logo. A little later, we’ll be looking at how to generate badges. In the Payments tab, we have a few preferences. The most important one is whether we want to allow people to pay by check or cash. When someone’s registering and they come to the credit card form, they’re going to see a button that allows them to bypass that payment form. Near that button will be our own custom message. If we allow people to do the same thing for dues, the same message will display there. So in that situation, it’s important that the bypass message be somewhat generic. Our organization doesn’t do that, we only allow people to bypass the credit card form for meeting registrations, so our message particularly pertains to the meetings. If we have this turned off, no message will appear.

If we’ve historically had problems collecting on unpaid meeting registrations, this may be the way to go. We can say that people have to pay online when they register for meetings with our organization. The last area, Messages and Forms, has two areas that we may want to make modifications to. First, there’s the message that appears at the bottoms of all order confirmation notices, whether these are paid or not. Policy information, like a refund or cancellation policy, should go here. The other area to update is the message that appears at the bottoms of the confirmations for all unpaid orders. This is where the remittance information should go. Since this will appear on the confirmation in addition to the previous message, it’s best that these two not overlap. After making changes, be sure to click on the Save button at the bottom. Now that we’ve configured our preferences, let’s go into the Meeting Manager to set up our next meeting.

We have a number of meetings already set up that are in this listing. The next one we need to enter in is our March meeting, so that’s what I’ll create today. At the top, we’ll click to add a new meeting. In the template drop-down, we can select any existing template or choose to create a new one. This option to create a new template does not appear later. If we need a template from this meeting, we ought to select that now. However, if you’ve already gone by this and you do need a template, you can always create one from scratch in the settings area that we looked at earlier.

On the next screen, we’ll start entering in the details. If we had selected a template, the time data would fill in as well as the venue data that we’ll see in a moment. The category for this will be a regular meeting, and since our meetings are always on the first Tuesday, we’ll click on the calendar, and set that date here. We’ll fill in the starting date, we’ll fill in the starting time, and the ending time. The registration cutoff is when registration closes for people to register themselves. As administrators, we can always register someone through the admin area, whether it’s before or after the meeting has happened. We’ll say that registration closes two days before the event.

If we have a late fee, we’ll enter in the date and time that the late fee kicks in. Let’s make this one week before the event. And we’ll also say that if you’re more than two weeks early, you qualify for the early discount. The early bird date and time is the deadline for someone to qualify for that discount. If we don’t have an early bird discount, or if we don’t have a late fee, these sets of data don’t actually do anything. We’ll be prompted to enter in the amounts coming up. In the venue section, we can enter a new one-time-only venue, or a reusable venue, or we can choose a venue that we’ve used before. We do recommend adding the full address because that plugs into Google Maps so that the registrants can get their driving directions. On the next screen, we have the details about the event. The headline is coming in from what we entered before, and the excerpt is a short blurb to get someone’s attention and get them to register for this meeting. We might have our guest speaker’s name, or information on legislative activity that we’ll be covering in this meeting. Or we might have a simple “Please join us.” The description is where the full details go. We can have detailed text here, or graphics, or links, or anything else we need. This might house your speaker bio or the agenda for the meeting. Or we can come back to that later. We can edit this meeting later on to enter further information or make modifications to what we’ve set up today.

On this screen, we have some general registration options along with the tickets and products. If we want to allow people to use discounts like voucher and coupon redemption, we can enable that here. We can also choose to disable registration for this event. We don’t have the details posted yet, so maybe this is still a save the date. If so, we’ll check this box, and come back to uncheck it once registration opens. This can also be useful in a situation where you’re advertising a meeting that’s not actually yours. It could be a regional meeting or something being put on by a local, related professional organization.  If we offer continuing education credits for the meeting, we’ll check that box here. Once we do that, when we add tickets, there will be a spot to enter a number of credits associated with each ticket we have. After the meeting, only the attendees—not the people who bought the ticket and didn’t come—will receive the continuing education credits noted on their profiles. The attendance cap here is for venues that may be small, or for special events that can only accommodate a limited number of people. The per-transaction fee doesn’t typically apply, but this would be for adding something like a processing charge.

Next, we’ll set up the tickets. The difference between tickets and products is that tickets give someone a seat and a badge. Tickets are for people. The products give someone an object. That may be a raffle ticket, or something immaterial like a sponsorship. It could be a study guide for a certification prep course. If someone only buys a product, they won’t receive a badge and they won’t be included on your head count. Sponsorships can go either way. If the sponsorship includes one or more seats at the meeting, it should be a ticket. If the sponsorship doesn’t include any seats or registrations, and the sponsor has to purchase them separately, it should be a product and not a ticket. We’ll want to make sure that we have member and non-member tickets for all the meetings we create. A shortcut for that is to enter those tickets on a template. If we had created this meeting based on a template, we would come to this page and find that tickets already existed. We can of course tweak that information on the individual meeting. Since we’re starting from scratch, I’ll be adding a new ticket here.

My first will be a member ticket. It should be published, and the description will be “Member Registration.” I’ll make it thirty-five dollars for members, and it should not be a multi-seat ticket. This option allows someone to purchase a pack of seats, and it’s really good for things like golf tournaments where someone’s going to register a foursome. You would check the box, enter in the number of seats, and adjust the price accordingly. When someone purchases this ticket, they’ll be prompted to enter in the names of four different registrants and answer the questions for each person registering. This setup ensures that you have the proper headcount for the meeting. Of course, it’s not necessary to create multi-seat tickets for every event. If you allow members to register each other, a member can simply buy one more ticket and select someone else’s name. Or they can buy a guest ticket along with their own registration.

I’m going to say members can receive a five dollar earlybird discount, but no late fee applies to them. Without a late fee, these dates will not show up. We do want this ticket to display on the meeting information page and on any meeting emails that we send out. Questions are next. These are for information we want to gather from the registrants that does not affect the ticket price. A very common question is meal selection. We’ll make that required and say “Please select your meal” with the appropriate options. We can also ask questions where the registrant will type in their information. We may say, “Do you have any questions for our guest speaker?” For a non-member ticket, we recommend putting on a question saying, “How did you hear about us?” or “Would you like to learn more about membership?”

Lastly, the restriction option. With this being a member ticket, it’s automatically restricted. Only a logged-in member can purchase it. But you may have other registration situations where you need slightly different restrictions. You can create a non-member ticket that only a member can buy. That might be for something like a promotion. If you’d like a member to be able to bring along a non-member colleague for recruitment, you might make that non-member ticket available only to logged-in members. Or you might have a discounted student ticket that only logged-in students can buy. The information in this drop-down is coming from the member groups over in the Membership section to the left. Your options are not necessarily going to match mine.

After adding the member ticket, we need one more for guests. I’ll make this a non-member ticket, enter the name, publish it. The price and for non-members, we’re going to put on a late fee. And not offer an early discount. In the questions section, we’ll want to ask the same questions. For our reporting, it’s best if these questions match exactly with the ones that are in the member ticket. When the question is an exact match, the system knows that it’s the same question for both tickets, and it will put the results in the same column of a spreadsheet export with the registration questions. So it’s a little bit easier to get this information tallied up when these questions match exactly. We can restrict purchase of the guest ticket. I don’t want to do that here, I’m just going to add it on. When I say guest or non-member, I’m talking about the same thing. This is a ticket that someone who’s not a member is eligible to purchase.

Under Catalog Products, if we have existing products within the Store area, we can add those on here. I don’t think any of those are appropriate for this meeting, so I’m going to move on to our next step.

The icons make the meeting listing page look good, and they gather a bit more attention for the upcoming meeting. So if we have an icon, we really should add it here. Your icon may be a photo of your guest speaker, it may be a photo of your venue, it may be the headliner sponsor’s logo. All of these are common uses for the icon feature.

In Documents, we can add any related documents to this meeting. This might be a copy of the guest speaker’s slide deck after the meeting has taken place. It might be meeting minutes, or it might be a printable worksheet for the meeting participants to fill out. We’ll fill in the information for the document, and if appropriate, we can restrict it just like we did the tickets.

On the final All Done screen, we get a recap of everything we’ve done. The meeting is still unpublished, so nobody’s going to see it yet. If we’re ready, we’ll click here to publish it. We also want to show this meeting in the meeting list modules. Those are smaller lists of meetings that may be on the home page, or on other pages within the system. And if we’ve finished the setup and we’re ready to turn this into a template, we’ll click the button here to save that template. This button isn’t going to instantly go away, though, so if we want to put this off until we’ve done a test registration to ensure everything works exactly as we need it to, we have that option. We have edit options for each one of the major sections if we need to make any changes. Now that our meeting’s all set up, let’s take a look. I’m going to open a new tab onto the front end of my system.

We don’t have the meeting we just created showing on the home page because it’s not our very next one; that spot is still being taken up by our February Member Welcome Session. But our new meeting is still in the upcoming meeting list with options to view the full details or register right away. The ticketing information appears along with all the details about the meeting. When we click to register, we’ll be prompted to log in if we’re a member, or continue without logging in if we’re not. If we continue as a guest, we’re not going to see the options to purchase member tickets.

We can add this non-member registration to our cart, or add two of them, and then we’ll fill in information for each one of our registrants. After adding the tickets, we would continue on to the review step, and then the payment information, where we would enter in credit card details to pay for the registration. Or we might click the bypass option, to skip that and pay at the door.

Registrations can also be placed within the admin area. We’ll hop back there now. In the Meeting Manager, we’ll find the meeting that we’re interested in and click on the registration button on the right. At the top, we’ll add a registration. Just like we were prompted to log in as a member before, first we need to say whether this registration is on behalf of a member, or a non-member who may already be in the Non-Member Manager, or a guest. The difference between these two is if it’s a non-member, we can search for them and have their information pre-filled. If they’re a guest, we’ll be prompted to enter in all of their details. I’m going to enter a member registration and I have options below to apply the late fee or the early discount. If we’re entering a registration through the admin area, we know that something a little unusual is going on, and so as an admin, you have the option to completely ignore the dates and times for the early discount or late fee. This means if we’re entering a registration through admin, we have to click the button to apply the early discount or late fee. Otherwise, this registration will be done with the regular ticket cost. The registration can be made complimentary, and we can choose to skip the receipt email. If we’re registering our guest speaker purely for the purposes of having the right headcount and getting the guest speaker a badge, we probably don’t want to send them a receipt. So we may choose that option. Our guest speaker probably isn’t paying for the meeting either, so we’ll check that option, too.

On this screen, we’ll choose what is being associated with this order. We have a member registration, and we have the option to choose other members because of how we configured our settings. We’ll add this ticket, and if we need to, we can add on a non-member ticket as well. After adding member or non-member tickets to the cart, if the meeting is set to allow voucher and coupon redemptions, a box to enter those will appear where my cursor is. It’s also required that this particular member or non-member have a discount they can use; if they don’t qualify for the discounts, the prompt will not show up. On the payments screen, we’ll enter all of the details or mark this registration as unpaid, or complimentary. On the next screen, we get our confirmation.

Since our test registration looked good, we’re ready to send out details of this meeting to the membership.  

One thing to keep in mind is that for most StarChapter plans, we include an option to schedule emails. It’s possible to set up a scheduled email that will go out automatically, three, five, or however may days you like before an upcoming meeting, and to target it so that it only goes out to those member and non-member contacts who have not yet registered. It can be a real time-saver when it comes to meeting promotion, or when doing other things like renewal notices. For today, we’ll send a one-off email using the Send Now option.

We’ll select the mailing type, Meeting Email, and the appropriate template. We’ll also select the meeting that we just set up. On the next screen, we’ll enter in the meeting content. On this screen, we’ll review the content for this mailing. We are seeing a notice because the reply-to email address really should match the web address where our system lives. If there’s a mismatch when we send out this email, it’ll look suspicious. It’s very common for people who run phishing scams to set a reply-to email address to something that sounds legitimate, like account services at PayPal, or Amazon, or anything of that nature. We can change the subject if we need to, and down below, we have the full details about that meeting along with the registration link and driving directions. While we can make changes to this mailing, those don’t update the meeting itself. So if anything material is changing, it’s best to go back into Meeting Manager, make the updates to the meeting, and then come here to Email Manager to send it out. On the attachments screen, we don’t need to do anything. We can move forward into the recipients. Since we’ve just created the meeting, it ought to go to all members and all non-members. However, for most meeting reminders, we’ll want to get a bit more picky. Under Meeting Registrants and Non-Registrants, we can send this email only to the members and non-members who have not yet registered.

The system will automatically filter out any duplicates, although there shouldn’t be duplicates between our member and non-member lists. Typically you may see some when adding recipients from the board and other committees, because there’s usually some overlap. We’ll see how many unsubscribed contacts have been removed, how many people are subscribed but have not verified their email addresses, how many addresses are bad, either from a hard failure or a soft bounce, and the total number of emails that will go out. For more detailed information on the recipients available for a mailing, and on what’s happening on the right, and how to deal with outdated email addresses, please check out our Communications training.

Next, we get a recap of everything we’ve done with edit options and a test feature here at the top. We can send a test email to ourselves, and if everything looks good, we have a final Send button at the bottom. We’ll cancel out of here for today and we can later come back to this unsent meeting email, to send it out to the member and non-member contacts who haven’t registered.

Let’s say that we’ve sent this out, some time has gone by, and we’re ready to finalize things for the meeting. We’ll go back into Meeting Manager, or we may go through Charts and Reports, and we’ll pull some data. To the right of our meeting, we have a shortcut button for reports that you can also access on the left. Because I know I have questions on the tickets, I’ll want to download the Meeting Questions Detail report. This will show us the details for all the registrations and who’s picked what when it comes to our questions. We may also want to go to the Meeting Registration Detail. Although Wi-Fi is available almost anywhere now, there are always times when you just can’t get a connection. So we strongly recommend downloading and printing out the Meeting Registration Detail, so that all of this information is available even if you can’t access the Internet at the venue. It always helps to have it as an emergency backup.

Having printed out those things for the meeting, the next step is managing the registration table. Before that, though, we should get the badges ready. Click on Badges, and then select which of the Avery label templates you’ll be using. Avery does have additional name badges, but some of them with other numbers, are an exact match to the dimensions on the templates seen here. Avery gives a different number, for example, for the sticky labels versus the cardstock ones that are printed and put into reusable badge holders. Select to print badges for everyone, or perhaps only the members, or only the guests. Take note of how many pages we need, then click Create Badges here on the right. A PDF gets generated with the local chapter logo, the information about the member, and the other details that were set within the meeting settings. When printing out these badges, make sure that the option to scale to page is not checked. Because these badges rely on fairly exact measurements, the fit or scale to page option is going to make the badges not print exactly where they ought to be, and some badges towards the bottom of the page may be in the wrong position. Skip that option, and you should have no problems.

Now that we have our badges, we’ll go into the registration section for this meeting. We have a listing of all the registrations that are already in the system. If Danny has come through the door, we’ll search for him here. With only one example registrant, a search isn’t needed, but for a large real event, we’ll probably have a lot of names. We’ll click the words Did Not Show to toggle his status to Attended. And there’s no outstanding balance. We can choose on the right to send a receipt. If Danny registered himself, he’d have gotten one already. Or we can cancel this registration entirely. That will remove it from the meeting list and the order will still be visible under Orders and Transactions, in the Order Manager. If Danny came down with something and can’t make it to the event, for example, we would cancel his registration. If we have walk-ins, we’ll click the button at the top to add their registrations. We looked at these options earlier, so we’ll be going quickly through here to show an example of handling an unpaid registration. An unpaid registrant like Teresa will appear like this, with a total due. There’s a payment button on the right to enter the payment details. And that’s it for the meeting management. There are other options to follow up, such as surveys about the meeting. For those, please check out our separate survey video. Thanks for watching, and good luck with your next meeting. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us using the support ticketing system