Controlling who can register when

Often clubs would like to offer registration to existing customers before they open registration to the public. NeatClubs.COM provides multiple mechanisms to control who is allowed to register when.

Among these mechanisms are:

Using registration passwords

Sometimes organizations would like to offer registration early to a particular group.  For example, you may want to test registration and offer it only to some friendly customers, offer registration for the next session to your existing customers first, or you might want to structure a promotion where only people with a valid password are permitted to register (possibly at a reduced cost).

If a registration password is in place, users will be able to see the program information as normal, but when they attempt to proceed with registration, they will be confronted by a screen that looks like the one below. In the example below we have a start date when public registration becomes available (which is why we are within allowed period for public registration), but we have additionally put a password on the registration event.

Registration passwords may be set for events in one of two ways. They can be set at the event level (for each class as an example), or they may be set once for all classes in a session using the bulk editor.

Defining a registration password for a single class

To remove a registration password, set the "Password for registration" field to be blank and press "Save".

Setting a registration password for all classes in a session

For convenience you can use the "Bulk Editor" to change the password for all classes in a given session and year. The procedure for changing properties (including the password) using the bulk editor is explained here.

Before any registration can happen, the registration event itself must be enabled and active. If registrations are not enabled for an event, no registration will be accepted regardless of the settings for passwords and auto-open dates.

Setting "auto-open dates" for members and the public

Sometimes we want to offer early registration to existing members of our organization. One way to do this of course is with a password as described above.   Another way is to allow only individuals who have a login account on our web-site to register.

As stated elsewhere, "Members" are defined in NeatClubs as individuals who have a log in account.

Consider this scenario:

a) Regular recreational classes start on January 3rd.

b) We wish to offer registration to our existing members (with login accounts) starting December 1st of the prior year

c) We think our existing members will largely fill our classes, therefore we wish to offer registration to the public starting late - December 22nd in our example.

To realize this policy, we can use the advanced registration settings screen as shown below for our class style event.

Note that both member and public registration are set to "auto-open" at particular times. (please note that at the time of this writing all times are expressed relative to the Eastern time zone - GMT - 5. If you are in California for example, and wanted to open registration at 9:00 AM pacific time, you would need to enter 12:00 as the auto-open time. (midnight is considered to be 00:00)

We should point at the "auto-open" is a convenient name for this feature, but what is really happening is that registrations are being preventing from occurring until the threshold dates are met.  It is important to understand that registrations must be "open" for this feature to work at all.  In this sense "auto-open" really just means "stop preventing" registrations.

If we attempt to register on December 21st (when registration is open only to members) for a Saturday morning Parents & Tots program, we would see a message similar to the one below.

Note that we do not have the option of creating a new account. The system is insisting that registration be confined only to individuals with a valid login. If we were attempting this registration in November, we would not be able to register at all - even if the event was open and we had a login.  This is because we would be attempting to register before the "auto-open to members" date of December 1st.

Setting "auto-open" dates for all classes in a session

Under "Calendar & Events", "Class & Session Administration", there is a utility that controls the dates that registration will be prevented until.

Select the "Prevent Registrations Until" option as shown below.

You will then be asked to identify the year and session that the new threshold dates will apply to.  You can provide separate dates and times for member registrations (those with login accounts) and public registrations (those without existing login accounts).  Please be careful to ensure that dates are entered exactly in the format "07/15/2009" (mm/dd/yyyy) - you need to provide the leading zeros to make sure that the month and day are two digits.

In the example below, we're going to prevent all registrations (public and members) for a Fall session until mid July.  After you set your threshold dates, the registration policy is displayed for all classes (remember these are separate event definitions) for the session.

The earliest start date for each class can of course be different depending on the day of the week that they start.  The "Offset" represented in the "OFF." column represents the number of days before the earliest start date that registrations will become available.

It might seem odd to think of it this way, but internally NeatClubs "thinks" in terms of the number of days before an event.  The reason for this is that it allows us to copy event definitions from session to session and year to year and still have the policy make sense.. For example you can always have member registrations open 90 days before the start of classes and public registrations open 30 days before the start of classes.

Using auto-open dates in combination with passwords

Often we would like to use passwords to "block" registration up until a particular date when public registration opens. After this date we would like registrations to proceed automatically even if we forget to remove the password that protects an event from receiving registrations.  In order to accommodate this, NeatClubs.COM provides an option to automatically ignore the password setting when an auto-open date is reached for the public. (member auto-open dates are unaffected by this setting)

The setting "Ignore passwords after auto-open" is shown below:

If this setting is set to "Yes", the public auto-open settings will take precedence over any password settings, and passwords will not be required after the public auto-open date. The default setting is "No" (as shown) which means that passwords will normally be respected. As a reminder, event registrations need to be enabled before any of these features will work.