Making Last Minute Changes to Your Registration Form

Making Last Minute Changes To Your Registration Forms

One of the advantages of online registration forms over printed paper forms is that last minute changes are possible. If you have 1000 registration forms printed and ready to mail it’s pretty hard to adjust an early bird date or
change the name of a break out session.

We aren’t saying that you should be changing these details at the last minute. We do understand that details can change at the last minute for one reason or the other.

Before you login to your system and start making changes, you need to consider the impact that the changes may have on the rest of the system. For example, changing a field such as “Member Status” can have a domino effect if the rest of your registration form uses the response to that question to determine the registration pricing and other available options on the form.

To help prevent minor and catastrophic problems from happening, follow these guidelines:

Double check your changes

Even the simplest changes can have an unexpected impact, especially when you are rushed. To reduce these surprises, do a visual check after every change.

For example, if you change your confirmation email, submit a test registration or use the send a test email feature to ensure that the email will look exactly as you want it to when it’s delivered.

Similarly, if you are updating text on your registration from, be sure to check the changes in your browser. Changing the length of text can cause unexpected wrapping, making a sentence that was perfectly aligned look out of place.

Submit a Test Registration When Changing Functionality

If you get into changing something on your form that involves functionality such as price calculations, logic that enables or disables options or other dynamic features, do a full test to ensure your changes didn’t break other options on the form. You don’t want registrants calling you to complain that an option they want isn’t available, especially since most people won’t take the time to call but will just abandon the form.

Consider the Impact on Reporting

When initially choosing the fields to add to your form, some consideration was given to how the collected data would be used in the reporting. Changing a field may prevent you from using the data in the intended way or break reports that
are already set up.

Consider the Impact on Registrations Already in the Database

The most difficult changes to make are changes to fields on the form after people have already registered for the event. For example, if you change the topic of a break out session and people have already registered for that
session, you will need to contact those people to see if they want to make a different selection. Similarly, if a few weeks into the registration, you decide that you need to collect membership numbers, it’s easy to add the field to the form,
but some people will have registered without the option to enter their membership number.

When you are using a full service system such as ePly, there will always be someone to advise you on the best way to make changes and advise on what needs to be done to guarantee problems aren’t inadvertently created. If you are using
a self serve system, go slowly and be sure to take extra time to re-test after
making changes.

ePly is a complete online event
registration service that covers every phase of the online registration
process: form planning, design, programming, testing, payment processing, refund
management tools, registration limits and tools to gather all the reports you
want so you can focus on what you do best: planning the actual event.