Written by Asaf Darash, CEO and Founder of Regpack
Planning a conference requires tracking several moving parts. Explore conference management software and the top features that can help you with this.
When you’re planning a substantially sized annual conference, there are many moving parts you need to keep track of, such as vendors, registrants, speakers, the venue, and more. It can seem like a lot to keep together. However, with a robust conference management platform, you’ll be able to manage everything on your plate.
Delegating your responsibilities is one of the top strategies you can use for event management, but you need a central system to track all of this progress in one place. With that central system comes some features that you can’t ignore. In this article, we’ll cover those exact features:
By taking advantage of these top features of your conference management software, you’ll set your next event up for success. Are you ready to take a closer look at each feature in more detail? Let’s get started!
The first element of your conference to focus on is registration. Part of driving conference registration through to completion means communicating with your applicants. When you don’t have an effective way to communicate when their registrations are incomplete or there are other issues, this can lead to a drop in your attendance.
These management features will help you effectively communicate with your applicants:
If you personalize your outreach to your conference attendees and offer easy ways for them to track their application progress, you’ll boost your attendance rates and make it easy for them to complete the process. When communication is streamlined, it makes the rest of your planning strategy that much easier.
When you register attendees for your conference, instilling trust in them should be a top priority. Without establishing a sense of trust in your online registration process, applicants will be less likely to complete their registrations. In order to establish that trust, make sure they don’t have to leave your website and go to a third-party provider to complete the process.
These features in your conference management software will help you achieve this:
Your registration software should offer all of these features so that your applicants trust their information will be kept safe and they recognize your branding on all of the marketing collateral, registration steps, and other conference materials. Boost engagement and registration with a prominent brand and integrated registration solution.
Along with your registration process, another component to include in your conference management software is a secure, integrated payment solution. Just as you establish trust with the rest of the registration process, direct payments on your website provide faith in your organization more so than a third-party payment processor. After all, sending your applicants to a third-party site will undoubtedly make you lose paying applicants.
With the right management software, you can easily integrate your payments into your own website and reap these benefits:
Integrated payments are a great way to gain your conference participants’ loyalty and trust because paying directly through the site assures them that their payment is going directly to you. This also makes accounting easier for you, as you don’t have to match up user registrations with payments that come via mail or third-party processors, which cuts down on time spent on data entry.
As with integrated registration, integrated payments will streamline your planning process and keep your attendance level higher.
While integrated registration and payments are excellent ways to streamline your conference management, there’s another way to make the registration process easier for your applicants, too. This is by allowing group registration.
With a group registration feature on your conference management platform, you can:
Group registration is a great way to get more people to register and boost attendee engagement. In addition, your registration system should allow you to register more than just attendees. Register vendors, exhibitors, sponsors, donors, and more! Conditional logic also sets different attendee types on their own registration path, ensuring you can manage your entire event in one place.
With individual and group registration capabilities, your attendance will rise and everyone will be able to take advantage of the easy system.
Of course, without a way to track all of your engagement, registration numbers, and payments, the features mentioned earlier won’t get you very far. That’s why it’s essential that you have a way to track and manage all of this data so that you can use it effectively, especially when looking for areas to improve during your next event.
Look for a conference management solution that offers these features:
With robust reporting capabilities, you’ll be able to track the data you need, keep your team members in the loop, and ensure you have what is required to move your event forward. Keep your conference management process as streamlined as possible with easily accessible data and track everything from one central location.
Beyond analyzing your attendance data, it’s important that you make other efforts to keep your attendees coming back to your conferences year after year. That’s where additional integrated tools come into play.
With integrated tools built into your conference management system, you can identify areas of improvement for your next event and keep your attendees loyal at the same time. Take advantage of integrated tools like:
All of these tools help automate your daily tasks and will keep attendees coming back each year. You can even incorporate thank-you gifts in the form of swag bags and t-shirts to show your appreciation and keep them engaged (explore some more thank-you gift ideas here).
By asking your attendees for their opinions and offering incentives to register, you’ll be able to boost attendance and make your events even better the next time around.
Part of planning your next conference event means being organized, delegating responsibilities, and staying on top of your planning process. But in addition to completing those tasks, it’s important to consider the software solutions that can help streamline those activities.
Choose a conference management software solution that allows you to communicate with your applicants, keep everything registration-related on your own website, and view your data as easily as possible. From there, you’ll set your next conference up for success!