FEW PEOPLE UNDERSTAND online meeting registration systems — or most meeting technologies, for that matter — as well as Jeff Rasco, president of Attendee Management Inc., Wimberley, Texas. Corporate Meetings & Incentives had the opportunity to sit down with him recently to discuss changes in the marketplace and to get advice on improving adoption rates, security concerns, pricing, and more.

Corporate Meetings & Incentives: Are group demographics the most important factor to implementing online registration successfully?

Jeff Rasco: We thought that if you had a young, professional group, you'd get a higher adoption rate, and if you were dealing with doctors or older people, you'd get a lot of faxes. While that's true, it's not nearly as bad as we thought it would be. For example, for a program at the beginning of '03 that was highly medically oriented, we had a goal of 20 percent online, but we went to 58 percent. One factor, obviously, is that more people are online. The other is the strong use of e-marketing. People respond in the way they are approached. If you mail out a registration form, people are going to mail it or fax it back. If you announce the meeting electronically and give them a quick link back, then they are going to tend to register online.

The demographics are important, but we've been surprised. We've gotten nearly 100 percent response from car dealers who often still work with computer systems that are DOS-based.

What techniques help to increase the percentage of attendees using online registration?

One of the easiest: Tell attendees that if they register online they'll pay a discounted registration fee. Some groups tell attendees that they'll get something extra in their pickup bag. Discounts, however, are the one thing that everyone can understand.

We do find that if there is payment involved, it's better to give attendees the option to send a check — register now, and send us a check later. People aren't afraid to register online, but some are still reluctant to give out personal information, such as their credit card or Social Security number.

We've also found that a simple little e-mail that says, “Hey, don't forget,” does wonders. We were doing a group of promotional meetings for a computer supply company and, as is common with no-fee meetings, people would say, “Yea I'm coming,” but, all good intentions, they didn't show up. We were seeing 70 percent to 80 percent no-shows. So we asked, what if we started e-mailing reminders a day or two before the meeting? Well, we went from 70 percent to 80 percent no-show to 50 percent or less, with just that one extra e-mail.

As online registration technologies evolve, where do you see the biggest improvements?

The technologies are talking together better. With the ability to tie together what had been very divergent processes — registration, housing, transportation — you now have all the data in one place. Now you have one set of data that you can share with the people who need it — instead of three, four, or even five sets of data. By having all the information in one place, you can start doing useful data mining. Now you can do things like see who is registered but has not booked a hotel room.

What you want is to be in control of your data. That is the key. Registration, housing, air technologies are evolving into one software that will allow you to do all of it — and to turn functions off and on as you need them, a more modular approach.

One thing that we're watching, out of self-preservation as much as anything else, is the interest that Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, and other online discount travel sites are showing toward the meeting industry. If you think about it, they're the world's best at getting users the cheapest flights, hotel rooms, rental cars …. Meetings are not a big stretch for them. What happens to the meeting technology companies if they're going up against Expedia?

I think you're going to see more of the meeting technology companies banding together out of self-defense. Consider StarCite's acquisition of b-there, for example. They already had RegWeb why do they need another registration solution? Well, they don't want the registration solution as much as they need the customer base. It's a war.

If you use a third-party registration company, how can you be sure that your data is secure and is not being sold or shared?

You need a very solid understanding of the vendor's Service Level Agreement and its privacy policy. Have your lawyer look them over. The SLA basically says how the security is established — the kind of encryption and the physical security at the server site. If a vendor won't or can't provide a Service Level Agreement to your satisfaction, that's the time to break off negotiations. The privacy policy needs to guarantee that your information won't be used in any other way, and should explain what happens to the data if the registration company goes out of business.

I've done consulting with a couple of major Fortune 500 companies looking at adding online registration, and their biggest concerns are security. They don't want their data on someone else's server. They want the data in-house. That limits your options. Only a handful of the online registration ASPs will do it — Register123 and eMeetingsOnline, among them.

Other ASPs started out offering those services, but found that it wasn't practical. They weren't just managing one software, but software on every server that their product was installed on. If they had an update, they had to get the update out to everyone. And these companies aren't Microsoft. They're relatively small and don't have the resources.

How is pricing for online registration changing?

With most ASPs, users pay a license fee, an annual renewal fee, and some transaction fee, plus something extra if there is credit card processing. The license fee preferably covers the entire organization, but sometimes fees are based on individual users (known as seats) or simultaneous users (meaning that, for example, five people in a 10-person department can use the system at any one time, but that all 10 people have access to the system). Every company is a little different. EMeetingsOnline, for example, came out and said just pay us a license fee and you can do as many meetings with as many attendees as you want.

You need to go in knowing what your business looks like. If you're doing more than 5,000 transactions, chances are pretty good that you're going to want a license. If it's under 5,000, you may want to look at the service side. That brings me to another pricing model. Some of the ASP companies aren't making the billions of dollars they thought they would just selling transactions, so they're ramping up their service side — building out clients' registration Web sites, training, etc. — and selling smaller numbers of transactions without having users buy an annual license. This is a whole different deal. This is pretty new. Before, if you talked to any of these companies, they would say, “We're a technology company.” Now they're saying, “We're a technology company that also offers some services.”