12 Aug 2010 4 Comments

Best Practice in Action: Aug. 12 – Make it easy for your event participants to register online

If you’re holding an event and want to use online registration, you will, of course, want the maximum possible number of potential registrants to sign up. This means making sure it’s easy and straightforward for them to go through the online registration process. FirstGiving provides a template for your registrations, but the questions and options are up to you, so it’s important to consider your registrants when setting up those questions.

Our friends at Lazarus House have made a clear, easily-understandable registration for their Hike for Hope event. As you can see in this screenshot, they have 4 different options for participants: someone can register as an individual adult or student, or as a family group, and if they can’t be at the event, they can still participate and fundraise as a Virtual Walker – they’ve taken care to have an explanation of that option for any registrants who might not be familiar with the concept.

In the registration questions, Lazarus House have recognized that someone who chooses Family Registration and registers 1 family will still need to give the t-shirt sizes of their various family members, since they’re not registering them each individually. To this end, they’ve put in a question asking for a list of t-shirt sizes a family group will need. The question isn’t mandatory, because not everyone registers as a family.

Lazarus House has also turned on the team function for this event, so one of their questions asks if the registrant is a Team Captain. However, since using the team function means there will automatically be a page that asks which team the registrant would like to join, they haven’t added a duplicate question here asking for the team name. It’s helpful to keep in mind the questions we’re already going to ask your registrants, so they don’t encounter duplicates and wind up skipping vital questions.

With a well-designed registration process, you’ll be able to collect all the information you need about your participants, and they’ll be pleased to breeze through a simple and straightforward questionnaire.

So, to recap:

  • Consider your registration types – are the options straightforward and is everything explained that needs to be?
  • Consider the information that you will need – is everything covered by your questions?
  • Consider the registration template – does FirstGiving already ask your participants a certain question?

by admin in FirstGiving news, Fundraising Tips Tags: