Get Your Spring Events Under Control Part 1: Registrations Published Mar 18, 2016 Springtime is event time in the church world. Creating and managing events, registrations and payments can be confusing and consuming. Not to mention juggling multiple calendars. As former church staff members, the Rock team knows this first hand and recently released a feature set that could make your spring events a breeze. The power of Rockʼs tools is the synergy they bring when they work together. This is certainly true in the area of event management. So as not to overwhelm though we'll start by describing each of the available tools as a stand-alone component. Next week, we'll dive into how you can use them together for mind-blowing results. Event Registration For many events itʼs good to know who will be coming. Rockʼs event registration features provide a simple tool to not only know who is planning to attend, but also to take care of many of the mundane tasks like event payments. Here is a list of the major features contained in event registration: Free/Paid Registrations Partial Payments Additional Fees Single or Multiple Registrant Registrations Discounts (Percentage and Fixed Amounts) Notifications Custom Entry Forms Confirmation and Reminder Emails Registration Templates vs. Registration Instances As you use the event features you'll find that many of your registrations are actually identical in terms of costs, fees and fields. To simplify the process of creating new registrations in these cases we've created the concept of a Registration Template. The template is where you'll configure the majority of the settings for a registration (things like costs, required entry fields, fees, etc.). Once the template is complete, you can create instances of them that configure the settings that would be specific to the event (registration start and end dates, contact info, etc.). The split between templates and instances has one final benefit. It allows you to separate security for configuring a registration from the security settings for implementing a new registration. For instance, you'll probably want to limit who can adjust costs, fees and discounts, while delegating who can set up a new registration for a reoccurring event. The Role of Groups By this point you've probably seen how important groups are in Rock. Groups also play a role in event registration. In many cases the end point of the event registration process is the placement of the registrants into a group that you configure. While you're not required to have your event registrations add people to groups, in most cases you'll want to enable things like event check-in. You can also do other clever things with the relationship between registrations and groups. Since nothing is keeping you from having more than one registration linked to a single group, you can handle complex registration scenarios. Say that your summer camp can only take so many boys vs. girls. In Rock you could setup two different registrations with separate caps for boys and girls. Both of these registrations can also put their registrants into the same group, giving you a single list of all children attending camp. Once you've created your event registration, you'll need to manage it through the registration lifecycle. From promotions to payments, Rock makes each of these steps as simple with a clean, intuitive user interface. For screenshot, examples, and a step-by-step walk-through, visit our Event and Calendar Guide online. The second post on spring events will focus on Calendars and Events. Look for that update next week.