We have a few courses that have breakout sessions, workshops, etc. And having to come up with workarounds to create linear registration paths to support these courses has been very time consuming. I’ve even recently rigged the new related courses feature for this very purpose!
Attribute caps: If every attribute (be it a registration fee for a particular specialty or for a dinner) could be capped that would be awesome. This way I could set a course to only take 25 physicians and a total of 100 people at a dinner, as an example.
-Currently I am forced to use child courses. I just did a course with 16 workshops that -have- to be capped, and it was very time consuming to have to create pages just to be able to use the cap feature at the course level. And then I had to figure out a way to lead the user to this second course page in a linear fashion without having to click out of the cart page when registering for the conference. Attributes with “rules”: Our previous vendor had pricing that allowed for easy “Early Bird” set-ups. Meaning I could set a price that would change to the full price depending on the date I set for that change to occur.
-Currently I have to use discount codes for every single level of any fee structure that has early birds. And sometimes they have more than just one early bird price. Attributes that don’t share SKUs: This one is a little difficult to explain. When I set-up regular registration, let’s say 3 fees for 3 groups of people (so it’s radio buttons) I can use discount codes, no problem. But once I add in a second set of attributes, let’s say my first set is Physicians, Nurses and Scientists, and then my second batch of attributes is for workshops, I can no longer use discount codes that only apply to my first batch for whatever reason. And on the back end it looks like the SKUs becomes affected (I restrict coupon use by SKU). So I can no longer set-up my restrictions.
-Currently are forced onto honor system.
I agree that there could be a lot of improvements done to this area of EthosCE. We currently do very little ‘special’ pricing as a result of the limitations we have encountered, and yes, we are forced to do things on the honor system which as we all know is pretty loosey-goosey (and forces us to really watch some of our registration reports to catch the culprits, which just feels really unprofessional). I would especially love to see a way to do ‘early bird’ pricing–we currently have to go in and change the prices manually when a meeting’s early bird pricing is over, and it’s a pain. I would also welcome a way to cap attendance without having to resort to crazy report monitoring or creating child courses which is ridiculously cumbersome for this application. I currently use registration questions for breakouts, which reports out beautifully, but has its own problems since that feature is actually not designed for this use.
I would participate on a task force to map out functions of attributes to help DLC create a more robust presentation.
We tried out a great app called SCHED for session signup. I liked it, but our users didn’t like the additional sign-on requirement. If it could be done with single-sign on via EthosCE, there wouldn’t be a reason to re-invent the wheel. However, the pricing discounts still are an issue.
I would of liked to use that in order to provide attendees with some kind of itinerary/listing of whatever workshops, breakouts, etc they chose when registering. But as far as I know those solely capture choices, meaning they wouldn’t be actually purchasing anything from there? Last I checked I couldn’t attach any sort of fees to enrollment questions.
So, I don’t think users would understand why they are choosing workshops in two instances, once in enrollment questions and then again when actually registering. They shouldn’t have to, anyway.
It’s actually not that bad. We do an attribute for the cost of the workshop, and they have to complete the enrollment questions before they check out. Do you have time to do a Webex today so I can show you how it works? If not today, we could set something up for the first week of January (our offices are actually closed between Christmas and New Year’s!).
Well I don’t know that it would work for the 16 workshop course we’ve got since I’m not using attributes for it. We -have- to cap them so they’re set-up as child courses. I mean I know enrollment questions would still work but…
Either way it would be great to see how you’re using this. I don’t have time today but I can definitely do January. I’ll shoot you an e-mail and we can sched!
Is that 10:00 PT? Not sure where you are. I have a 10:00 PT meeting scheduled already for Jan 3, so I’m hoping you are on the east coast somewhere and I can still attend your web meeting.
