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EXPO TECH

Do-it-yourself registration Case study: Managing multiple events with licensed software By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor More than 2,000 people registered onsite for PDAC 2002, held March 9–13 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre,but there was no waiting in line.

 Thanks to 16 self-service stations, delegates filled out their registration forms and paid online or by check at the counter. 

“By the time they walked from the computer to the registration desk, their badges and kits were waiting for them,” says Carolyne Oughton, Vice President, Business Development for The Pinnacle Group, the Toronto-based event management company that handles the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s annual show on mineral exploration.

The process was enabled by ExpoTrack, software developed by 3-Way Street Corp. in Ottawa to manage all aspects of an event. The Pinnacle Group has used ExpoTrack since 1995 to manage eight to 10 conventions and trade shows a year with just 20 full-time staff. 

ExpoTrack costs $7,500 for a site license. The Pinnacle Group uses the software to manage registration, exhibit sales, abstract and paper processing and membership for its association clients. Oughton says the program is particularly suited for pre- and on-site registration. Events that don’t need online registration can be managed entirely in-house. To provide online registration, 3-Way Street programs the registration forms and processes the transactions through a server at its headquarters. “We get the best of both worlds,” says Oughton. “We’re allowed to customize the system, but we don’t incur the expense of in-house programming.”

Setting up online registration costs $1,400 per event, which includes the first 400 online registrants. After that, per-transaction fees apply. There’s also an additional fee for programming the forms. Depending on the complexity, such as tiered pricing, multiple versions and translations, programming costs $500 to $2,500 for each event.

No matter what the source — online or offline — all data goes into one database, which can be queried for real-time reports by contact type (delegate, speaker, exhibitor or sponsor). The Pinnacle Group’s clients can also query the database using Microsoft Windows Terminal Services, which saves the trouble of sending periodic reports. ExpoTrack also enables The Pinnacle Group to do e-mail marketing, automatically confirm registrations and send conference reminders. 

For PDAC 2002, online preregistration was offered to delegates for the first time. Exhibitors and other participants faxed, mailed or phoned in advance registrations. Of the 7,000 registrations processed, about 1,200 were online, 3,800 came in by fax, phone or mail, and the remainder were on site. 

The Pinnacle Group set up on-site registration with ExpoTrack running on a local server. Credit card payments were processed in less than 30 seconds through an online banking service, which was accessed through the network’s Internet connection. That kept last-minute registrants moving through the system and into the main event.

Cathy Chatfield-Taylor covers meeting technology as a freelance writer/editor. E-mail: cathy@cc-tunlimited.com.