Current behavior:
Wild Apricot assumes that mos attendees will be pre-registering online and does not provide any special functionality for on-site registrations and attendance tracking. It is still possible to handle that in the following way:
- record on-site registrations and collect payments. Record attendance. (We assume that you will do it on the piece of paper instead of directly into the system, though this is possible as well).  
- enter all onsite registrations manually via admin backend using 'Add attendee' button. (You might want to add a special registration type 'Onsite' to make reconciliation easier)
- add option buttons field to the event registration form, e.g. 'Attended?' Yes/No
- Now go to each registration and set this field to proper value
This works but is not the most convenient way to do it.

Desired behavior:
Functionality specifically tailored for entering onsite registrations and attendance. Specifically:
- a way to record how exactly the payment was received for each onsite registration
- a way to record attendance on a list of people, instead of going into each record.
- ability to filter/export attendee list by onsite vs. pre-registered; attended/not

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

This would benefit us.  We also have a lot of free events and people tend not to register for these events cause they know they can "just show up". 

If we had this capability, people would see how quickly they could check in if they were already registered and it may sway them to register for future events.

While walk-up registrations are a small part of our events, they are a regular occurence, and in my 6 years with the organization we have never had an event without walk-ups. So, for tracking purposes, I would like to see this.

our group would ABSOLUTELY benefit from having this functionality available.  we currently have two needs for this time of behavior.

 1. we have a weekly (free) event where we would like to be able to track student attendance.  we have been using the registration tool and setting up kiosks for students to "register" on-site. however, this process is slow and cumbersome when we have more than 100 students on some weeks.  however, we continue to use it because it saves lots of volunteer hours from having to log in attendance.

2.  the second usage we would like is for events where students can register online and then check-in on the day of the event.  this allows us to track if students are "missing" before we leave for the weekend away or again is an attendance function, allowing us to track all of the programs our students attend throughout the year.

i would LOVE to see these implemented for the next school year.

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chrissy remsberg

I would love to see this as well.  It would greatly improve the speed of marking attendance each Sunday for our church.  Obviously there are no pre-registeration for Sunday morning service, so we'd have to enter all the info manually, off of attendance cards in the pews.  A checklist for members to be added to an Event would greatly increase the speed for church leadership to see who has been there and who wasn't, and followup.

 Thanks for considering this!

I think the biggest issue is a way to "check-in" pre-registered individuals because those that sign up and have pending payment status have to be caught at registration so we can get their money.  Administratively, we also like to to know who actually showed up from the pre-registered list.

For onsite walk-ins, we have simply used the pre-registration website function to do onsite registration and it works great.  It does require us to have internet access, but that has never been a problem.  I don't know if we need anything different for walk-in registrations.

I'd like to add to this as a critical need assuming by capturing "who" attended you can also track  all events attended by person.  I offer participation points for attended events and there is currently no way to manage this.

As a possible suggestion to the original intent of this post.  A competitor issues club cards with a unique bar code to each member.  They simply scan the members with a hand held scanner and upload to their database.  This way every member is captured efficiently and you eliminate paper and/or database entry.  Isn't that the purpose of this software to eliminate inefficient operations?

This is one of the items that we have listed on our Top 50 for the year. Our plan it to launch this feature in 2010.

Keep checking this forum for updates on how we plan to implement this, or if you have any suggestions or ideas on how you would like this to work.

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Giuliano Valentino, Useful Apricot

I think a "check in" feature would be really important.  We currently just use the event registration page as is for on site registrations using a internet connection onsite.  It works fine and we have several people registering people on-site at the same time.  However, we have no way to track quickly and easily who actually showed up.  Having that extra field and more importantly an easy and quick way to click that field off would be great.

Part of the analysis process is documenting how the solution should work, describing what changes have to be made to a page, how the admins access a feature, how members might use a feature (if applicable) etc.

We have been working and analyzing how to track attendance at an event  for a while. We believe we have a solution that would work in Wild Apricot. But we want to make sure that it meets your needs.

In the next post I shall be sharing the detailed solution for this. There's a little bit of technical information in it, but nothing too daunting. It's also a fairly high-level view of it, so there aren't a lot of deep details, but more a general idea of how it would work,

I'd love it if you could read through it, imagine how it would look and how you would use it, and let us know if there is anything we missed or if there is anything you might not need, or need to work but in a slightly different way.

Thanks!

 

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Giuliano Valentino, Useful Apricot

Attendance status field

• This is a new field that will be added by the system to Event registration.
  

Attendees Tab

• On the attendees tab, add a column Attendance status between the Payment status and the Delete button
• This column has three radio buttons - Attended, Not Attending and Waiting (selected by default. Means that registrant has not shown up and has not stated they will not be coming)
• When the registrant is checking in, the admin selects Attended. This updates the Attendance status field
• Setting status to Not Attended means that the registrant has notified the event organizers that he will not be attending, but this might need to be tracked differently than someone who does not show up at all (there might be no refund, for example, if they said they weren't attending after a cut off date).
• Filtering the list: There are currently checkboxes on the attendee screen that change the display for Confirmed/Pending status. There will be options which will limit the list of just people who have checked in, or are not attending etc..Attendees can be further searched using the search box already on the page.
  

Event details for the Contact

• The Attendance status can be changed on the contact's Event Registration Details. It will be in the Status area.
• Contact card: On the event tab of the contact card, add column for Attendance status for each event the contact has registered for. This should be between the registration type and amount columns.
  

Guests

• For cases where parent registration has guests, we may be we need to add textbox to enter number of guests near () Attended radio option (so when admin change Attendance status to Attended, he can also enter number of guests)

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Giuliano Valentino, Useful Apricot

Here are some additions to this list to consider for the design:

1. Allow simple name badges to be printed from the attendee list. Forget the design aspect, just something simple at this point.
2. Add a check-in processing page to the system. I like the "attendance status" field, but this would work best in conjunction with a page that could be processed live or later for quickly adjusting the status.

I really like the list you published. I will be thrilled to see these things added. I hope my suggestions are not too difficult to implement, and add to the discussion and design.

Regards,

Bill

Hi Bill,

Re name badges - the best way to comment is on this thread: http://www.wildapricot.com/forums/thread/6799.aspx
We need to find the overall solution - whether simple or more sophisticated one.

Re check-in - understood, we will review this in context of this feature. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

The way I would use an Event Registration report is as follows.

The day/ night before an event I would like to print out a list of all registered (confirmed/pending) participants.  

At my event I want to have two types of forms/reports:

1. A sign-in form for the event participants
2. A registration/payment report for the event staff

The sign-in form should just include name, email address and a place for event registrants to sign-in.  The registration/payment report would be used by event staff to track who has pre-paid (online) and collect money from pending attendees.

On the sign-in form I'd like to ask interest-related questions such as "are you interested in becoming a member", "would you like to receive our newsletter", etc.

If I could essentially generate a custom registration/payment report similar to the Attendees Export (but with the fields I select) I could then copy/paste that data into my two forms which would probably be templates in Word/Excel with my logo, contact info etc.

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Kyle Mitchell | www.spec.bc.ca

Kyle, I moved your comment to a different thread which I think is closer related to what you are talking about. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot