Planning an event is always an intricate and demanding process. But when you’re planning a massive event to handle crowds numbering in the thousands, it’s a whole new ballgame. There are so many more people to plan for, accommodate, and satisfy.
The registration process alone is one highly important part of event management. If your conference registration software isn’t up to the task of properly organizing, sorting, and managing all your registrants, you’ll soon find your event is falling apart at the seams.
Fortunately, there are several measures you can take to prevent any major mishaps when planning a large event.
Choose a Dependable Registration System
Before you begin any part of event planning, you’ll need to make sure the event registration system you choose is powerful enough to handle a large number of registrants. Your software program should allow you to integrate it with other platforms like your CRM and email marketing programs.
Because you’ll be dealing with large crowds, your system should also be reliable enough that it wo’t crash with a massive influx of registrants. Losing potential attendees because they were unable to register or unwilling to deal with technical issues would be a completely avoidable tragedy.
Create Discounts
Because you’re planning a large event, you naturally want to ensure that your venue is as full as possible. An efficient way to encourage your audience to register is to offer discounts.
Some examples of markdowns you can offer include discounted rates for groups, early bird registrants, and VIP upgrades. Each of these options encourages people to take advantage of your prorated event tickets and register as soon as possible, ensuring you fill your quota.
Remember that when you create these discounts, you want the process to be clear and simple for your registrants. This means that you should clearly display the terms and conditions, deadlines, and any other disclaimers for all registrants. It should also be straightforward for registrants to use your discount code.
Carefully Craft Your Registration Form
Once you’ve attracted registrants, you ca’t risk losing their interest by using thoughtlessly designed registration forms. You might include too many irrelevant questions or neglect to ask important questions, leading to confusion and backed-up lines at the event’s check-in point.
When you build your registration form, make sure to include enough questions to gather useful information about your registrants. However, you’ll need to carefully balance the amount of questions with your registrants’ attention span. If you make them spend too much time needlessly answering dozens of questions, you risk them closing out the form altogether.
To combat this, learn to strike a balance in your questions so you get all the necessary information, but you also keep your registrants’ interests piqued.
Send Regular Reminders
Keeping your registrants’ attention requires more than a thoughtfully built registration form. You also need to send regular reminder emails leading up to your event.
These emails can-and should-consist of a variety of content. Some can share important information that registrants will need to know before attending your event. Other emails can share sneak peeks: short bios on keynote speakers, raffles, and virtual countdowns are all excellent ways to keep your event at the front of your guests’ minds.
Modernize the Check-In Process
If your idea of a check-in area includes clipboards, pads of paper, or boxes of pre-printed badges, it’s time to update your check-in process.
The first in-person interaction guests will have with your brand is when they check in to your event. Having your employees manually check each guest in by flipping through papers, checking off their name, and sorting through boxes of badges to find the correct one does nothing but slow lines to a crawl and give guests a terrible first impression.
Revolutionizing your check-in process to streamline it only involves a few simple changes. First, your check-in software should allow one-click VIP upsells and on-demand conference badge printing. This will get guests through the check-in process in less than a few minutes (and minimize typos on badges, too).
You can also use QR codes for quick scanning so guests can easily access every session. QR codes are also a perfect alternative to using an event app-attendees simply scan the code and can then access everything from a map of the venue and event schedule to menus and updates.
Large Crowds? No Problem
It can feel intimidating to plan an event for thousands of attendees. Larger crowds mean more potential for mishaps-but they can also mean more chances to create lasting impressions and convert one-time guests into loyal return attendees. If you follow these tips, you’ll have a greater chance of putting on an event that thousands will remember for years to come.