2017 was a busy year for us here at athleteReg. A lot goes on behind the scenes to not only keep things running smoothly, but to make sure that we are constantly improving the athleteReg experience for all event directors, and participants that use our registration and fundraising platforms.
In 2017 we completed hundreds of improvements and new features across all of our platforms. We strive to be constantly improving, iterating, and creating new and useful features for our event directors and participants. Following is a quick breakdown of 10 noteworthy improvements we made in 2017.
1. PledgeReg Overhaul
This year we undertook a major overhaul to our peer-to-peer fundraising platform PledgeReg, touching on the fundraiser side, the event director management area, and the event setup process.
Fundraiser
On the fundraiser side, PledgeReg received a major visual overhaul, adding cover photos, re-working the event and fundraiser page and adding new outreach tools. Our new interface is streamlined and mobile-friendly, making it easy for fundraisers to promote and manage, and for donors to contribute.
Event Director
For the event, we completely overhauled our event setup, changing over to a step-by-step wizard which walks you through a few steps to quickly and easily setup your event. Event directors now also have the ability to enable a fundraising page through their registration page.
The event management area also received a major overhaul in form and function, changing the menu items into an easy-to-use, mobile friendly display, and re-working our feature pages for ease-of-use.
2. Email Tracking and Analytics
Providing email tracking and analytics gives event directors the ability to better see at-a-glance how well their email has been received, be it for marketing or just general outreach purposes. Our displayed tracking shows number of opens, clicks and checkouts, if a link to a registration page was provided in the email.
3. Advanced Email Filters
For event directors who host many events with us, or event directors who want to make full use of their database of participants we now offer advanced email filtering. Previously, we allowed you to select and email participants from any of your current or past events, segmenting by event, or by category within an event. With the new advanced filtering system, you can drill down even further to search for more specific targets. Using your entire event database, you can search by participant age, gender, number of events registered in a given period, and distance from zip code. This sort of segmentation allows event directors to search for very specific groups of people, and then send them an email.
4. PlegeReg Page Sharing Improvements
With peer-to-peer fundraising, the ability to share the donation page is paramount, which is why we made the fundraiser ‘Share My Page’ section a focus for improvements this year. Fundraisers can continue to share their page on Facebook or Twitter, and now have access to more powerful email tools, allowing them to save drafts and use previously sent emails.
5. Waivers Added Based on Sanctioning Body
athleteReg platforms now have the ability to auto-add an organization’s specific waiver based on setting the event as sanctioned in event setup. This takes the guess work out of implementing a required waiver and saves time for both the event director and the sanctioning body.
We already have several organizations on board with our pre-set waiver, and we are constantly adding new waivers to our system, so if you are a sanctioning body interested in using this feature, please reach out!
6. Multiple Waivers
Events can sometimes have multiple organizations or requirements that it must meet legally, which is why we created the ability to have multiple waivers on any one event. This system allows the event director to require participants agree to multiple waivers, as many as are deemed necessary, before continuing to checkout. This makes it easier for events with a multiple waiver stipulation to allow their participants to register online.
7. Event Waivers – Email Out to All Un-Agreed to Participants
As an event director you can add in an event waiver at any time, but if you add a waiver after participants have registered, what about the participants that haven’t signed the waiver? We now auto-detect who has, and has not signed the online waiver and give you the ability to email out a request to sign to all participants who have yet to. This makes event day easier for you, since you won’t have to require that all participants sign a paper waiver on site.
8. Block Pricing
Our fee schedule feature has been in place for a while now, which allows event directors to set price increases by date, but this year we decided to make the idea of discounted early registration more encompassing with our new block pricing feature.
Block pricing allows event directors to set a schedule of fee increases per category based on the number of participants in the category, as opposed to an increase on a set date. This gives early bird pricing a real sense of urgency, as participants won’t know when the threshold for an increase will be hit, depending on how fast registration is going.
9. Registration Credits
Event directors have always had the ability to refund their participants, either in part or in whole, but this year we took it one step further with our new credits feature. Event directors now have the ability to issue a participant a credit instead of a refund. A credit will allow the participant to register for a future event, even one that has not yet been created. This feature gives event directors greater flexibility, especially when event budgets are tight.
10. Fundraising Summary Emails
An improvement for both our PledgeReg event directors and fundraisers from the past year was to introduce the weekly fundraising summary email. For event directors, it gives a quick rundown of the fundraising progress from the past week, including top donors and top teams. For participants, the summary email is an excellent tool to remind them about their fundraising goals.
We’d like to thank all participants who registered with us, and all of our event directors, both old and new, who chose to host their events with us in 2017; we have even bigger and better things planned for 2018!