How do you assign people to classes?  What do you do when a class is filled? What do you do if a class is cancelled?

Discussion about the job of the registrar and what can be done to make the process better for the registrar and participants.  Please respond to this first post unless you're specifically addressing a subtopic raised in a major post.

Comments

fiberrae

This is one if not the largest tasks out there.  We have had people do this all by hand and suffer health issues as a consequence. So as conference chair I have decided to do Regonline.  It is not without its issues and we will undoubtedly suffer the consequences of being the first in our regional guild area to try it. But we haven't a skilled programmer to write an MS Access database as did the previous two conferences. And we will not spend the reported $3600 to purchase one of the those products. We have heard good things about this and know a number of professional organizations that use this for conferences.  

If any of you have experience with Regonline...I would like to hear it....I'll make a separate post.

lkautio (not verified)

I've been NEWS registrar - once (kind of thing everyone should do once, but maybe not twice!).  I did it by hand and it was not the worst job I've done.  NEWS is not huge (200-275 attendees), which helps. 

The best way to make the registrar's job easier is to have someone have put some thought into the planning of concurrent classes.  One or more popular classes which can go into a larger space and take a lot of people helps if you need to juggle.  Trying to plan out "tracks" of topics (so that everything a person wants to take is not in the same session) is useful.  A little flexibility on the part of the registrar can help, too (doing it by hand feels like it has a little more give to it). 

Being sure there are enough class spots for the number of people who will attend is really critical.  If you have 6 classes with a 20 person limit in a time slot and 250 attendees, this is not going to end well.  That may mean flexibility in class sizes, more classes.  It is tough to predict the registration numbers and the feeling is often to go conservative in number of classes to save money, but that may be counterproductive. It may be better to establish a cap and stick to it or only take people provisionally after a certain point is reached.

Laurie Autio