RegOnline for Event Registration of our Annual Conference
Rating: 9 out of 10
November 14, 2016
Vetted Review
Verified User
3 years of experience
RegOnline is being used by my graduate department within a university to manage registrations and payments for a single event we hold annually, with about 110 registrants who must utilize RegOnline. The primary business problem that we encountered PRIOR to our use of RegOnline was our inability to accept credit card payments. We used to provide a simple registration form through our event's page, and then I'd have to manually send out an email to registrants explaining the payment options: Payment by check, wire transfer, or money order.
RegOnline was very helpful by solving our main need: providing a credit card option to registrants, and the ability to send us the account funds monthly by check to deposit in our university account. The main bonus was the ease in refunding occasional participants! Prior to this I had to do a cumbersome Non-Employee Reimbursement to refund participants who needed to cancel, but now I'm able to simply click a few buttons to refund electronically (as long as funds are in our account). It's been so helpful!
RegOnline was very helpful by solving our main need: providing a credit card option to registrants, and the ability to send us the account funds monthly by check to deposit in our university account. The main bonus was the ease in refunding occasional participants! Prior to this I had to do a cumbersome Non-Employee Reimbursement to refund participants who needed to cancel, but now I'm able to simply click a few buttons to refund electronically (as long as funds are in our account). It's been so helpful!
- RegOnline is able to handle credit card payments, cashing out once per month by sending a check to me (paid to the university) via mail. This was the main reason that we needed the site, and it is it's best feature.
- Customizable options were added this year, and though a little confusing at first they have been great at adding additional details in headers on pages (on pages that I formerly was unable to provide additional instructions).
- The registration system itself has been useful for managing registrants, and being able to easily update those who still chose to pay 'offline' via check or wire transfer (allowing me to still easily see all paid participants).
Cons
- I find that the Help feature could be more intuitive, and could potentially address more issues that I've had (and solved). At this point it is cumbersome, and doesn't seem properly updated for the site's newest features.
- Another complaint I have is that some of the reports only export as PDF, and some of the information would be helpful in both Excel/PDF options.
- My other thought would be to allow more options at customizing the registration form page as well in the builder: certain types of optional questions I would have preferred to group together, but had no capability to do so. It would be helpful to be able to manipulate the pages more, and shift the order/grouping of many optional questions. I say this because I had to have the "Gender" option in one location, while other questions about ethnicity/degree/etc. in another location; this caused many to skip certain questions. To add to the registration form issue, I feel that more "fill in the blank" customizable payment options would be helpful too.
- Everyone has been incredibly happy being able to pay on credit card! Prior to RegOnline, our only payment options were by check, money order, or wire transfer. I personally had to deposit many, many more personal checks to the university on behalf of participants. So participants have been happy with the credit card option (it was requested by many every year until the switch to RegOnline), but it also has been very helpful at saving me time as well.
- The negative impact has been that we had a free registration page set up prior to RegOnline, that we dropped fully. So while some participants still pay by check or wire transfer, we still must pay the 'per participant' fee even for participants not paying through RegOnline.
Since our university did not have any other recommendations, our department only considered RegOnline for use. We chose not to use something simpler for just payments (such as Paypal) as our university said that they would not be able to determine which department the funds would be deposited to the university for, which would cause us issues.