With all the work that’s involved in hosting a marathon or a local 5k, and with an increasingly competitive events industry, many event organisers are searching for new and innovative ways to streamline their workload whilst also improving their event’s prestige and overall participant satisfaction. While the growing trend is to move all elements of managing an event online using event registration software, many event organisers are still hesitant that their participants will be reluctant at the thought of submitting their data online. Here are 5 key benefits of putting your event registration online that may allay those fears:

1. Quick and easy. Paper registrations require the entrant to download the form and print it out or pick up a copy from the event office. They then have to fill out the form, write a cheque, and then either pay postage to mail the completed form and cheque back to the event office, or jump in the car to drop it off. Whilst participants may not have ever really thought twice about the hassle this archaic entry process was, online entry is a fast and seamless experience that truly makes the registration process easy for the participant. The online registration form will look and feel just like your own site, so the experience is seamless to the user, and they will therefore feel like they never left your website. An online registrant can quickly fill out a simple custom tailored form that will collect only the information required for their category (Adult, Child, 10k, 5k etc) and submit it within minutes.
2. Automatic email confirmation. The average time from the day a paper entry form is received to when the participant gets confirmation of their registration is often days and sometimes even weeks. Events that accept paper registrations may spend a large portion of their work day answering phone calls and replying to emails from worried registrants curiously checking if their cheque and registration form have been received. Most online event registration software will automatically send the participant a confirmation email notifying them that their payment has been received and that they are now registered for the event. This instant confirmation will give your participants peace of mind and will also reduce the administrative work required to reply to concerned participants curious about the status of their entry.
3. Secure online data submission. That being said, there are always exceptions and I would urge that when you search for an online registration provider you should inquire about their security standards and the safeguards they have in place to protect your participant’s data and guarantee that it is held in a secure environment. Once you have found a provider that stores all participant data behind a firewall and encrypts all payment information, you can rest assured that hosting your registrant data online is as secure, if not more so, than asking your participants to send their payment information in the post.
4. Real-time reporting. A common gripe with most event organisers is the lack of transparency – they never know how many people will be showing up to their event until the very last days of the registration period. Accepting paper registration forms requires manual updates to attendee reports and especially in those last days just before the event, the increased workload can be difficult to cope with. An online registration system will provide the ability to watch registration data in real-time. This ensures that you get an accurate count of the number of participants expected, which then helps determine the supplies needed to support them when they show up to the event.
5. Using less paper is good for the environment. This may seem trivial, but with the growing trend of people altering their daily lives to reduce their personal impact on the environment, more and more event organisers are also doing their part and in the process finding that “Going Green” and eliminating their paper entry forms is appealing to the athlete community. Developing an environmental impact statement and branding your event as a “Green Event” is not only good for the environment, but may prove valuable to your marketing campaign.

In summary, with more and more people describing themselves as “tech savvy” these days, there is no reason to believe that your event participants will turn up their noses to online registration. People are becoming increasingly comfortable with online transactions and as an event organiser you can therefore reap the many benefits of putting your event registration online using event registration software that can help streamline your workload.