Event Planning Checklist

Give Us 5 Minutes and We'll Give you 21% More Registrants

RegOnline's mission is not just to automate the process of taking registrations and payments for events, but ultimately to make event professionals' lives easier. 

To help you on your way to creating better events, we've developed this checklist for event planning that should help you gain more registrants in just a few steps.

1. Have an Automated System

Sure, we'd love for you to use RegOnline for your event planning and registration needs, but we know that it isn't possible for everyone to immediately change over to a new system.  But the reasoning for an automated system is pretty easy to follow.  Suffice it to say that an automated system makes things easier for your attendees, in turn giving you more registrations with less hassle.

For a more in-depth analysis of how an automated system helps you and your attendees, check this out.

2. Offer an Early-bird Discount

Recently we conducted a study on the 45,000+ events that have used our system for registration, and we found that planning professionals can increase their total registrations by quite a large percentage if they were to use a correctly timed, properly discounted early-bird offer. 

Early-bird offers give a double benefit because they give you more registrations sooner (and usually overall) and they also give you more accurate numbers to judge hotel block size, etc. for your vendors.  For in-depth information on our research, read this report.

3. Maximize Registration Time

The more time your attendees have to register, the more registrations you will collect.  Our research shows that 6 months of registration time is probably close to optimal (as attendees will have trouble planning their schedule further out than 2 quarters), but there is very little downside to have registration open longer.  Plus, the more time you give registrants, the more time you also have to educate them about the value of your event, and why they should attend.

4. Talk to Attendees After the Event

Post-event follow-up is very often overlooked, but that also means it is very easy to stand apart from the crowd by asking attendees what they liked and what you could do better.  Remember to thank your attendees first, and then request them to fill out a short survey about your event. 

The most important part of this tip is that you should act on the data you receive!  Don't just read it and store it, you should come away with 3 or 4 things you can implement for your next event, so make sure they happen.

5. Offer a Guarantee

Showing your prospective attendees that you stand behind the value of your event is a powerful way of establishing trust and credibility.  In our experience, the risk of a few refunds is far outweighed by the extra attendance you will receive by offering a money-back guarantee. 

You can structure guarantees however you'd like, but some ideas are: ensure satisfaction by the first-day's mid-morning break, or a lifetime guarantee.  Just make sure to word your guarantee so that it assumes the attendee will enjoy the event (e.g. "If you really, truly feel like you gain nothing from my event (which will shock me to the core!) I will refund your registration fee in full.").

We sincerely hope that you find this event planning checklist useful and that its implementation unlocks extra attendance potential in your events.

As long as you're here, why not check out a free account with RegOnline?