Conference Registration
We're trying something new this year with the registration for the Annual Conference. We're going Online! And taking credit card payments as well as checks. Lee and I have wanted to do something like this for awhile, but we were never able to figure out a way to make it happen. There are several organizations out there on the web that are more than happy to take registrations for conferences and other things for you, but they all want you to pay them a fair amount of money both up-front and on a regular basis. I'm sure that they are very good companies, and that they are easy to work with, but we never felt that ASDAL wanted to spend the kind of money they were asking. If our conference was regularly being attended by several hundred people, then maybe. But for now, we had to come up with something different.
I think it was Ruth that suggested PayPal. They are well-known, secure, and most of all, they don't require start-up fees or monthly payments. At least not at the basic level that we would need. But I wasn't sure that we would be able to get the amount of information through them that we would need for planning a conference. What kind of room would people like? Who would their roommate be? That sort of thing. So we had to find a way to get that information on our own but still let people use PayPal to pay with their credit cards.
I had a form that I had used before for submitting proposals for poster sessions or conference presentations as well as a form for registering for the conference that didn't really do anything apart from adding up the amount of money a registrant would have to pay. So with a great deal of help from Ron, the systems person here at McKee Library, I was able to merge the forms in a way that would send both us and the registrant an e-mail detailing the information they were submitting. It's not a pretty e-mail, as you will be able to see when you register, but it does convey the basic information. And we were able to figure out a way to pass a variable cost on to PayPal. That's basically what's been taking us so long to get the registration process started this year.
So I apologize to everyone for taking so long, but it is up now on the conference website (http://www.asdal.org/conf/2006/), so we invite you to send in your registration and come and see us here at Southern this summer!
One final note, I'm posting this after the form went "live," and after I announced it on the SDA-Librarian discussion list, and our first registrant is Cynthia Helms! So congratulations Cynthia.
I think it was Ruth that suggested PayPal. They are well-known, secure, and most of all, they don't require start-up fees or monthly payments. At least not at the basic level that we would need. But I wasn't sure that we would be able to get the amount of information through them that we would need for planning a conference. What kind of room would people like? Who would their roommate be? That sort of thing. So we had to find a way to get that information on our own but still let people use PayPal to pay with their credit cards.
I had a form that I had used before for submitting proposals for poster sessions or conference presentations as well as a form for registering for the conference that didn't really do anything apart from adding up the amount of money a registrant would have to pay. So with a great deal of help from Ron, the systems person here at McKee Library, I was able to merge the forms in a way that would send both us and the registrant an e-mail detailing the information they were submitting. It's not a pretty e-mail, as you will be able to see when you register, but it does convey the basic information. And we were able to figure out a way to pass a variable cost on to PayPal. That's basically what's been taking us so long to get the registration process started this year.
So I apologize to everyone for taking so long, but it is up now on the conference website (http://www.asdal.org/conf/2006/), so we invite you to send in your registration and come and see us here at Southern this summer!
One final note, I'm posting this after the form went "live," and after I announced it on the SDA-Librarian discussion list, and our first registrant is Cynthia Helms! So congratulations Cynthia.
posted by Stan | 5:20 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home