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Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends Church

Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends Church Adds Acteva Pro to Manage Events with Complex Requirements.

Challenge     Implement an efficient registration solution

Solution        Acteva Pro - the premier solution for complex event registration

Results          Easy integration freed up time and nearly eliminated customer complaints

Background

Based in Newberg, Oregon, The Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends (NWYM) consists of 71 Christ-centered Quaker Churches spread throughout five states in the Pacific Northwest. The annual July conference is such an important landmark event that it requires a landmark solution to meet their needs.

For many years, Bruce Bishop Communications Coordinator for NWYM, followed a specific protocol when planning his annual conference. He and his staff began by mailing traditional paper registration forms to conference alumni and potential attendees - most of whom hadn't been contacted since the previous year's event. This often led to mail marked 'return to sender' and forced him to track down alumni from past events through word of mouth.

Mr. Bishop was quickly becoming overwhelmed with paperwork and was simply spending too much time gathering member registration data from multiple source locations. Collecting payments was also a major headache since accepting payments via check was a timeconsuming process, wrought with difficulties.

"It was strictly a paper-centered process, registrations were sent by mail and entered manually in our database," says Bishop. "The old way of doing things just wasn't working for us anymore."

Business Challenge: Multiple calendars and tracks needed for better people, data management

The annual conference in July is a five-day event that includes multiple tracks with sign-ups for multiple sessions, room and board for out of town visitors and other specific, designated tracks. "This is the first time we have tried incorporating online registration and we have a pretty complicated list of event offerings for this one conference," says Bishop.

Mr. Bishop determined they would need three calendars covering a five day period with an anticipated total of 400+ attendees. They also have five registered administrators- each with different levels of technical expertise. He also wanted to be sure they could register children and adults separately, or pastors and their children since they receive a special discount.

Acteva Solution: New Acteva Pro solution with multiple tracks and event calendar functionality

After researching other options, Mr. Bishop concluded that Acteva, in particular the new Acteva Pro solution, was just what they needed for the NWYM event. Acteva Pro is an online event management solution created specifically for events with complex registration requirements. "The complexity of our event ruled out some of the other vendors as did the opportunity to process payments online," says Bishop. "Because it's such a complex event with multiple tracks, we looked at each vendor to see if they could provide the specific registration options we needed."

Mr. Bishop chose Acteva Pro just a few months before the event and got started. After determining the number of invitees, locations and other options available, the Acteva Professional Service Team worked through a discovery process and booking path roadmap. The complexity of the solution required custom tailoring work specific for NWYM to ensure streamlined success and registration.

An additional key feature was the online payment option which allowed them to securely collect payments ahead of time. "About half of the participants paid online which was a huge time savings, allowing our administrators to focus on the other details of the event vs. processing paper payments and orders," says Mr. Bishop. "We're looking forward to increasing that 50% online payment to 80 or even 100% in the future since it makes the process that much easier."

Acteva Pro was instrumental in streamlining their conference registration and allowed attendees to self-register - saving Mr. Bishop and his team valuable time and resources. Attendees could sign up for multiple events in a single transaction, save in-progress orders and return to make changes at another time. NWYM administrators could assign multiple, tiered discount rules by attendee type, price, event, and/or catalog. This unique set up allowed detailed reporting and transparency for efficiency on the days of the conference.

Finally, NWYM added the survey feature to learn valuable information and to get insight into attendee preferences going forward for the next conference. "The surveys were great," says Bishop. "We received a lot of great feedback on the conference and the registration process. It was a simple and easy to deploy tool. A lot of senior citizens registered online this year and the positive feedback was nearly unanimous."

Results: Consolidated, accurate attendee registration & payment data from multiple regions

The end result was that Mr. Bishop achieved his goal of an easier registration and payment process for all involved along with increased pre-registrations, which greatly streamlined the check-in process. The feedback from surveys and word of mouth only reinforced his satisfaction with the new process. "Running our big event online was new to us and the Acteva team was very helpful in guiding us along throughout the process," he says.

He adds that the Acteva Service Team played a key role from start to finish. "I would use Acteva again. I was really impressed by their responsiveness to our needs and concerns. We got really good feedback and support from Acteva - you really had a great service team available for first-time users such as us."

Mr. Bishop concludes by adding "I would say it was a tremendous success overall! We had 454 people pre-register, a record number for us, and our evaluations of the registration/ check-in process were tremendously positive. In past years, it was one of our lowest rated items. In the end we were very satisfied with Acteva."

Experience that counts

Acteva is the trusted leader in Online Event Management, including Event Registration and Payment Services, Private Social Networks and Learning Registration & Management Services. Since 1998, over 16, 500 customers have used Acteva to manage more than 300,000 events and process more than 5.1 million registrations. Acteva's customers include Bausch & Lomb, Pfizer, SAP, Girl Scouts of America, Whole Foods, BMW/MINI, NASA, VMware, Apple, DHL, PG&E and thousands of small to large-sized businesses and organizations.