Creating a registration form is one of the first steps in your event organisation. It allows you to register your event’s attendees and collect information that will help you refine your planning.
It is therefore paramount to the event organisation process and creating it requires special attention. The quality of your online registration form will impact the quality of your event. We have compiled some valuable tips to help you create the perfect online registration form, and successfully organise your event.
Summary
1. Choosing your online registration solution.
The first thing you need, in this context, is a tool to create your online form. It has the advantage of helping you not only create and manage your fields and information, but also help you sell tickets and register attendees for your event. The chosen software must allow you to create your registration forms based on your needs and the specificities of your event. All the information you will collect using the form should be used only by yourself. Data safety must be a priority!
In addition, make sure that the creation process is easy and fast, and does not require expert IT skills. Also, your online registration solution must have all the features you need to create your perfect online registration form (given the specificities of your event) and manage the number of attendees at your event.
2. Customise your form.
A customised registration form is a successful form. You should always take into consideration the type of attendees interested in your event in order to customise your form accordingly. You will not ask the same information from festival-goers as you would from workshop or conference attendees. Try to see things from the point of view of the audience and imagine what information they may be willing to share to an organisation that they more or less trust.
You can expect different types of responses. Make sure that you choose a solution that offers all types: text field, comment field, drop-down, attachments, date, check boxes, country. Also ensure that your chosen tool allows you to create custom fields.
Customising your form starts with the visuals. The essence of the event must be reflected in the visual aspect of the form. Of course, you should not saturate it with colours and images at the risk of looking unprofessional and tainting the visual aspect. The simplest and safest option is to play with colours – in the background, buttons, or texts.
3. Know what is important and aim right.
When you start organising an event, collecting as much information as possible about participants is important for your planning. Asking for plenty of information is even more appealing if you do not intend to stop at this one event. Nevertheless, do not give in to this temptation! All the data you collect should be relevant and appropriate. Think about what you really need to know to carry out the event.
The questions asked must be concise and precise. Specify the mandatory nature of some questions if you feel the need to do so. Add a comment under said question if needed. Classifying questions based on their relationship to the participant is also a good trick to put into practice.
No Man’s World Desert Festival designed a short form, asking only what was strictly necessary and remembering important details such as the country code in the phone number field and the option to receive an invoice.
4. Simplify access to the registration form.
The simplicity of the registration process depends primarily on your chosen online solution. To simplify the registration process, it must enable you to easily share registration links with guests. You can share it via email, newsletters, your website or social media…whatever your chosen channel the selected participants should have easy access to the event’s registration form.
To allow them to use your services even more easily, you can pre-fill a few boxes of the registration form for them using the information you already know about them. It may relate to their identity, location, etc. This will greatly simplify registration, thereby encouraging even more participants to take the plunge!
5. Make it quick.
Whether this is your first event or one in a long list of events, special emphasis should be placed on the speed of the registration process. Several actions can encourage people to register faster for your event or membership of your club. The first is to always specify the total number of remaining tickets for sale – this shows the attendees that the event is popular and expected by many people. The fewer tickets remain, the faster the attendees will register.
Willingness to register will be stronger and registration will follow immediately. Another factor of registration speed is the time a person needs to complete their registration. You should always specify the remaining number of sections or pages so that the person filling in the form knows how much time they will need to complete it. You should also give a clear indication of the time it takes to fill in the form.
6. Include suggested answers.
Filling in a registration form can be tedious for the user – do not hesitate to include some drop-down lists with suggestions to simplify the information filling process. Therefore if your form includes a lot of questions, the participant won’t have to manually enter each answer.
Also, your online registration solution should allow you to automatically send confirmation emails to the attendees, telling them their registration was received..
7. Add relevant information.
The main purpose of the registration form is to allow participants to register for your event. It must therefore provide them with useful information and give them key details about the event. The name of the event is the first thing that should appear on your form.
The date and location of the event are also essential information that must appear on the form. Feel free to insert a Google Map link to help people locate your event. Also, add a short description of the event containing some useful information for your attendees. The importance of this small information is real and allows you to convince future participants to register for your event.
In short, several small tips can help you create and share the perfect registration form for your events. It is important that this key step takes into account not only your own needs, but also – and above all – the needs and wishes of your future attendees!
You too can create an online registration form using Weezevent by clicking here:
