Smooth Operator

RegWeb features flexible design, strong support to ease the online registration process.

 By E.J. Siwek, CMP

As we have all witnessed, the use of the Web has brought online meeting and event registrations into reality. For the developers of these useful applications, there have been two roads to choose between for financing development work. The fast track — and certainly the fad — is aggressive venture capital financing. The time-tested model is a combination of private funding and self-financing. Early in the game, Rod Marymor, partner of Cardinal Productions, made a strategic decision to adopt the stable path of self-financing. There are risks and benefits to this approach: While development tends to be slower because fewer resources are available, one of the benefits is that you control your own destiny.

Among companies focused on online registration applications, RegWeb is small in comparison to its competitors — the company has four programmers for development, four customer support staff, and three sales staff. However, the size can be a plus. Considering the overall market trend and the ROI involved in activating an online registration option, those companies with nimble, responsive staffs will survive. With venture capital, a company can staff up too quickly.

At the end of 2000, RegWeb had a core user group of 50 organizations; RegWeb’s 5.0 version is scheduled for release in the second quarter of 2001. In an effort to provide a more complete solution to the Web-connected meeting professional, its integration with StarCite, launched in January 2001, will provide an online tool utilizing StarCite’s comprehensive database to search for suppliers, send requests for proposals, and consolidate meetings-related data.

In taking a closer look at RegWeb, I found that it showed one of the most intuitive and thorough approaches to flexible design customizations. The company has 11 modules available and, in contrast to its leading competitors, includes all of the 11 modules in the purchase price.

Reg Web provides both registrant access as well as administrative access. The administrative access allows the host organization to define the components of a meeting or series of meetings. When the planner selects “meeting setup” as an option off the toolbar, she can control the look and feel of the potential attendee’s view of the online registration Web site. Without third party intervention, the planner can toggle on and off any preferred options. In essence, in little time and without professional guidance, the host meeting professional can compile a online registration form complete with credit card processing and automated response.

Collectively, RegWeb will help the meeting professional in the areas of attendee registration; housing; travel; financial management; name badges and tickets; secure transactions; programs, events, and agenda; data import and export; personalized e-mail messaging; real-time reports; program calendar and archive; and fully customizable front end.

The simplified power of RegWeb allows one to quickly build a robust Web site for managing an event. In little time, after the meeting detail has been entered and the site’s look has been defined, prospective registrants may complete registration, place housing requests, request travel, and pay for their transactions. Once registered, registrants may be informed of breaking event activity, be polled as part of an online survey, or be added to several relational databases for data mining or manipulation.

One of the organizations using RegWeb is ConferenceTrack, a full-service seminar and event marketing company. They needed to move from LAN-based to Web-based registration to handle a 13-city, fourth-quarter road show dropped in their lap in Sept. 2000. ConferenceTrack and its client, a technology company, immediately perceived Web-based registration as essential to success. RegWeb came in with a clear understanding of the problem and a detailed explanation of how to reach goals. With an average registration of 250-plus in multiple cities over a five-week operations interval, smooth transaction management was essential.

Another company was ruled out by ConferenceTrack because of inflexible software design. “When we switched to RegWeb, we did not have time to take the training,” said Kevin O’Sullivan, ConferenceTrack president. “This might have been a blessing in disguise because we learned quickly how important it is to have an outstanding team standing behind the promises. RegWeb folks were constantly there, keeping us out of trouble.”

O’Sullivan has worked with Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Application Service Providers (ASPs), Local Area Network (LAN) installation and maintenance providers, and individual technology consultants. From these experiences, he suggests buyers follow two simple rules: 1) Know what you want to do, and 2) Evaluate the people making promises. The RegWeb story, he insists, underlines the main point about working with a technology services company: Only 50 percent of the purchase is the technology, software, or methodology of the vendor’s offering. The other 50 percent is the commitment and “stick-to-it-iveness” of the people who say they’ll be there for you. To hear more about ConferenceTrack’s experiences with RegWeb, contact O’Sullivan at (888) 653-2645 or kosullivan@conferencetrack.com. For more information on RegWeb, simply log into www.regweb.com, e-mail info@regweb.com, or call (888) 755-7075.

E.J. Siwek is director of marketing of Excel Partnership, an international training organization, and president and founder of Flashpoint Technologies, LLC. Forward your questions about technology to him at techeditor@pcma.org.

CONVENE - March 2001 - Meeting Technology

©2001 Professional Convention Management Association