Regional Workshop Registration Software Review

Cindy Thompson and the CREW Planning Team have been using Regpack now for 2 years. They host an annual 1-day workshop event for around 1,000 people with hundreds of workshops to choose from.

When Cindy and her team first discovered Regpack, after using another event registration software that didn’t meet their needs, she figured it was probably too good to be true. Once she started using Regpack, she realized in fact, Regpack is as good as they say.

From triggered emails to assigning permissions to other admins on her planning team, to filtering attendees by county, Regpack has given the CREW planning team the tools they need to execute a great event!

Big thanks to Cindy for taking the time to share her thoughts on using Regpack!

Tell me a little bit about yourself, your school, and the yearly event you organize.

Illustration from Regional Workshop Registration Software Review

The event we use Regpack for is larger than just the school I work for. I serve on a planning team that coordinates a regional event, the 8 westernmost school districts in North Carolina.

We have representatives from each of those districts that meet to plan the event.

My role is one of the planning team members.

You’ve been using Regpack for 2 years now. What did you use for registration before Regpack?

We used Eventbrite. I think it was free, but I didn’t set that one up. It was clunky and confusing to use. We just knew we had to get something new. Our first meeting 2 weeks after the event, the topic of conversation was “what are we going to use for registration, this was terrible for our event”. So we started doing research.

Everyone came back to the table a few weeks later. Several of us had read reviews about Regpack. We were a little skeptical. You sounded too good to be true. Now I’m one of those people who sing your praises. The testimonials really are true and it’s been a wonderful experience.

How was the process of building your system with Regpack and using a Project Manager to set up your system?

It was so easy! Our project manager set everything up. I went in as a test user and made a list of things that needed tweaking. She fixed it.

I don’t consider myself tech savvy. The Support staff, and the videos and the articles got me through anything at any hour of the day and night. It was amazing how wonderful everybody was to work with.

Even our attendees have complimented the registration system, which we think is incredible. Usually, feedback is complaints, but not with Regpack. They say it’s easy, it’s quick.

This year we reused accounts from last year, and so they could just go into their account, confirm their data and move forward so they didn’t need to create new accounts. It was phenomenal.

You use a lot of email templates and triggering in your system. Can you talk more about how that helps your planning process?

I did create my own emails and she taught me how to set those to trigger and go to specific people. If you were registering from my system, you got an email with my return email address. If you were registering from another county, then you got an email from that county’s planning representative. That was fantastic to be able to have that level of detail in our reply to questions and registration inquiries.

The emails are just phenomenal. If someone started registration but didn’t finish, the system just sends them a reminder email that they didn’t finish with reminders about the registration deadline. Then after the deadline passed, I could go pull users who were incomplete and craft a new email to send to them reminding them of the missed deadline and to complete registration.

This year you used our new Copy Project feature. How was your experience?

This year we were able to use the copy function which saved us money. I still called on the Support team some, as I got a little more adventurous and did more with the system. I found out there’s even more we can do with it, and we’re already talking about how we’re going to use it next year and what changes to make in the system. It’s really powerful.

When you researched other registration software, what was it about Regpack that stood out to you?

The price got our attention. We could turn it on and turn it off. Being a collection of school systems, we do not have a dedicated budget for this event. It is local businesses that give us grants to pay for Regpack, our food, to pay for other expenses.

All the planning team, this is on top of our regular job. Event planning is not our full-time duty. We needed something that was cost effective and easy to use and we weren’t paying for it in the months we didn’t need it.

The affordability got our attention first. We had a demo and answered our questions. I think our sales rep actually emailed me ahead of time for event details so he had prepared his presentation to answer some of our questions before we even knew to ask them. Which was fantastic.

Once we verified with Regpack that there were no hidden fees, no extra costs, we weren’t being billed per question when we contacted our project manager or the support team, we really didn’t look any further. Nobody else in their basic information on the web was as attractive as Regpack. Once we made contact with Regpack employees, it was fantastic. Everything we saw on the web, we saw followed through in real life.

We really joked at that meeting that Regpack was too good to be true. That it was one of those Cinderella things and did we want a unicorn and a rainbow with that order. Again, I’m now one of those people. I don’t know about the unicorns and rainbows. But Regpack sure does a great job registering folks for our event.

How are you using Regpack’s filters to create your roster reports?

So to put a lot in perspective, we have 278 workshop options this year in our day-long conference. People have 4 different time slots. Attendees are required to register for 1 option in each of the time slots. We set that up as products in Regpack.

Reports are fantastic. I can immediately and quickly pull information. If someone from a neighboring county says how many people from my county registered, I can filter and tell them how many people. I can pull the report and then filter out folks, or send the entire report to people.

If I have a presenter who asks how many people are coming so I know how many widgets to bring so people have something to work with, I can look at that really quickly and easily and tell them.

We can also set quotas so we don’t have 50 people sign up to be in a session and the room they are using only has 20 chairs. That was an important function to have for our presenter’s sake and our attendees.

Since this event isn’t your full-time job, how has Regpack saved you time?

One thing I remember when we used our previous system, we had one login. It was one person’s login and we were sharing it between counties when we wanted to look at data. So if I was looking at something and somebody else was too, it would knock you out. Anything you were doing, you lost. And you can’t call 8 or 9 people every time you want to log in and ask “are you on?”.

So Regpack’s part-time admin option is phenomenal. That’s another testimonial of the power of the reports I can pull as a primary administrator. It’s so easy for me to pull reports I need and forward them to our county contacts every few days, and those part-time admins don’t even need to login!

Part-time admins were equally pleased with the ease of use and ability to edit registration information. The other system also didn’t allow for admins to login and change information either. Regpack does allow us to make changes.

I also have the part-time admins set up so when they log in the system, they only see their county people. That helps them not be overwhelmed with 900 or 1,000 attendees. They have their 100 or 200 people they are looking at. That helps just allowing everything to run more smoothly.