Prior to 2021, a prospective client emailed us looking for help with the conference registration process he managed every spring for his non-profit organization.
The 2-day conference welcomes about 1,000 attendees annually. Joe had a team of about 10 people acting as registrars who interfaced with and managed the registrations for a variety of groups attending the event (~75%). Additionally, individual registrations would come in via their marketing website (~25%).
Everything was done using Excel spreadsheets over email. Change management was a headache. Human errors were not uncommon. Everything funneled through Joe; this was a full-time job for him for three months at the start of each conference year. Nonetheless, Joe had a process and a team and made it work every year. But it was clear that he was exhausted and he knew there were opportunities for improvement.
Joe had done his research. He had experimented with some of the most popular off-the-shelf digital solutions, but his use case was uniquely complex, and so no existing solution could handle all of his needs. So Joe contacted an established agency, and they sent him back a proposal for $200,000. But Joe didn’t have that kind of budget.
We set to work with Joe to deeply understand the process. We proposed an iterative approach designed to transform first the greatest area of opportunity, at a price point Joe could budget for. Joe would get the custom solution he needed, creating the operational efficiencies he desired, for a cost his budget could afford.
Step #1 - Centralize the registration system. Create a single source of truth with a single point of entry, accessible by each member of his team, with oversight controls for Joe to manage everything. The solution? A multi-tenant web UI application on cloud infrastructure.
We successfully rolled out the new system in time for the 2021 conference and provided training for the team. And as we used the new system over the next two months, we identified new functions and features we wanted to add into the system. We added an activity log so Joe could oversee the details of every change that occurred over time. We enforced rules and limitations previously not possible with Excel spreadsheets.
More importantly, we identified the next big opportunity: printing name badges. A few days before the conference starts, attendee name badges are printed. Joe had maintained a separate system–and thus a duplicate copy of the registrations–to manage the printing. Once the initial printing was complete, Joe then had to manually remember which name badges to reprint as changes continued to be made over the next 4-5 days.
Step #2 - Enable name badge printing and intelligent management in the new system. The solution? Create a function to alert Joe when which badges needed to be reprinted as changes continued to be made, and then automatically produce the new badges for printing.
The 2021 conference was a success. Joe and his team were thrilled with the new system. And now Joe’s wheels were spinning on how to make it even better for 2022.
Joe and his team have now used the new system for the last four years. We’ve fixed bugs along the way and added tons of new features.
Allow external registrar users into the system to manage registrations for their group and only their group
An intelligent mechanism to catch potential duplicate registrations of the same attendee made by different team members
Master switches to indicate when an item has become sold out to prevent further additions
One-click intelligent upload & import of individual registrations created from the marketing website by attendees
Most notably, Joe added a new capability not previously available to him: he could now make data-driven decisions in real time to identify and predict outcomes for the conference. All of the data, past and present, was now accessible through a single interface, available at the click of a button.
Joe shared the following data points with his team following the 2024 conference:
We had 29 registrar users in the system in 2024. Compare that to 32 in 2023, 21 in 2022, and just 9 in 2021.
We registered 1,043 unique attendees. 78% (814) came to us through YOU and 22% (229) were self-service individuals.
There were 2,465 registration changes made in the system (add, update, delete).
After the 2024 conference, Joe announced that after managing conference registrations for the past 15 years, he felt confident that he could step back and hand off the responsibility to the organization’s executive director and rest of the team. The new system enabled Joe to codify the entire process into a single, largely automated solution. And managing registrations was no longer a full-time job for the first three months of each conference year. This was a massive victory for both Joe and the organization.
We are happy to have earned Joe’s business and trust over the past 5 years. His team has been incredible to work with. We will continue to serve the organization as the system we’ve iteratively developed over that time now changes hands from one leader to the next.
This is the Honeyguide way.
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