Why you should move your association’s event registration to your AMS

With a small staff, it’s important for your association to work as efficiently as possible.   

Here’s how moving your event registration to your association management software can help you save time and get more done. 

By Christine Bergeron, Marketing Coordinator, Community Brands

You might be accustomed to managing event registration in spreadsheets or some other system. But there are multiple advantages to moving your event registration to your association management software (AMS). 

As an association with a small staff, it’s important to work as efficiently as possible. Here are five ways that managing event registration in your AMS can help you do more, faster: 

1. Keep all of your member data in one place.
Your association’s member data is a powerful tool. You can use member data to make more informed decisions for your organization. Data-based insights can help you enhance the member experience, streamline your overall operations, and even anticipate future needs for your association. But you can’t use your member data effectively if it’s sitting in spreadsheets or scattered in multiple systems.

By moving event registration to your AMS, you can access that data as part of a complete picture of your members. You can see who they are and how they’re engaging with your association – all in one place. 

For example, YourMembership AMS by Community Brands is all-in-one membership management software, including event registration and management functionality, that offers a more complete and accurate view of your data. It gives you greater insights into your membership base to help with recruiting, engagement, and retention.

2. Manage email communications more easily.
Some members have registered for your next event. Some haven’t. Registrants have signed up for different tracks and different activities. Juggling email communications with these various groups can eat up a lot of time.

But by hosting event registration through your AMS, you can easily track these various audiences and send them the right communications to encourage them to register, thank them for registering, and/or send them details about the event activities they’ll be attending. 

For instance, using YourMembership AMS, you can segment audiences based on multiple criteria, set up dynamic or static email lists, and easily create and send email communications to the right audiences. 

3. Easily accept and manage payments.
It can be tough to keep track of your finances if you have membership and other payments in different systems. When you move your event registration into your AMS, you can make accounting much easier for your association because all payments are managed and tracked through the same system. 

For example, with YourMembership AMS, you can accept event registration payments securely while using separate bank accounts for different types of payments, such as dues and event registration. 

4. Make continuing education credit management a snap. 
Your members look to your association for educational opportunities to fulfill industry continuing education requirements. And your events help you deliver those opportunities. At the same time, your members want to advance their careers, and they need the certifications to do so. But managing events and keeping track of continuing education credits and certifications can be a handful if you try to tackle it all manually. 
 
Moving your event registration and management to your AMS can help you streamline the process of tracking and awarding professional development credits and certifications for your event attendees. 
 
For example, using YourMembership AMS, you can track who attended each event and session, and then automatically award the appropriate number of credits to each attendee. To make things easier on your members and staff, your members can log in to a member portal to view their continuing education credits and certifications. And you can set up YourMembership to automatically send emails when members have earned credits.

5. Keep historical data for marketing purposes.
Event registration can tell you a lot about which people might be interested in becoming members of your association and which members are most engaged with your organization. By moving your event registration into your AMS, you can keep historical registration data and use it for more informed and targeted marketing. 

TIP: YourMembership AMS has event management functionality built in for all of your basic event management needs, including event registration, event check-in, badge printing, and more. If you need to take your event management to the next level, take a look at the Pathable event management platform by Community Brands. 

As if these five benefits weren’t enough to move your event registration to your AMS, here are two bonus benefits: 

• During the online registration process, you can offer people the option to join your association or renew their membership. You can then automatically process the membership within your AMS.
• If you use an AMS, like YourMembership AMS, that includes online member community functionality, you can easily post in your community when event registration opens to drive more visibility for your event. 

Learn more.
When you have a small staff, it’s important to find ways to work as efficiently and effectively as possible. YourMembership AMS can help you streamline your event registration and management activities so you can spend more time providing a great member experience. 

Find out more: Explore YourMembership AMS.