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The audience for your event can be made up of many different targets (members, non-members, exhibitors, etc.) and you may want to offer different packages, prices and sessions for each of these targets. Let’s take a basic example comparing members and non-members for your event, where you may offer a special price for a session to your members.

Our platform will allow you to set up the different pricing for these targets, but how do you ensure that people coming to the site to register are actually members? While it’s true that you can probably catch a non-member who registered as a member prior to them attending your event, it would be simplier and more effective to try and prevent them from registering for it in the first place.

You likely have a members database with unique identifiers (e.g. member ID) for each of your members, wouldn’t it be great if the system could ask each registrant claiming to be a member to enter their member ID and have it check against your dB to see if it’s a valid member ID?

This is where validation codes come into play by allowing you to setup name value pairs (e.g. memberID: 123456) within our system that can be used to validate a registrants data to determine whether they should be authenticated for the target (e.g. member) that they are selecting.

You can upload a file or event connect via an API to provide our platform with the required data. For the security conscious it is important to note that we do not have access to your confidential data on your members, it’s just code data for our system and therefore allows you to keep your private data private.

Validation codes are even more flexible with the added features.

• Termination Date: Set a date for each name value pair after which the code is no longer valid.
• Available Uses: Allow the code to be used more than one time, such as in the case of a group or team.
• Used Count: View and Manage how often a code has been used, change the value to allow reuse.
• ListID:  Add a listID to each validation code and you can easily delete an entire list of codes in one click.

There is no 100% solution when dealing with registrants, however, it’s in your best interest to mitigate the issues where you can and validation codes are a good place to start.

Longer Answer: No, but you should use them.

Creating logical and clear event categories will allow you to grow your events business while maintaining a clear overview of the types of events you have. Who’s attending your events, and what types of events consistently attract a good audience.

As the Admin of your account you can create and organize the categories that are available to your Meeting and Event organizers, you may also temporarily disable certain categories if you no longer want people to set up new events within that category.

They’re easy to use and will help you keep a better handle on your events, so take a few minutes and set them up. You’ll eventually be glad you did.

A major event facility going green with it’s energy usage and operations programs.

Here is some info received recently from MPI.  It is very similar to what we went over during the “green” webinar.

Here is a spot on CNN’s website that they post items on from time to time.  This can be good for some general knowledge with regards to trends and new technologies.

This article gives some personal tips on how to take some affordable steps to being “green”  or, as I prefer, efforts toward sustainability.

Here is some more personal info for saving energy.  There are some links off of this page to efforts being made on a corporate scale to bring sustainable and healthy living/working concepts to building design.  A standard that more companies should strive for…. how many people consciously associate better work environments with significant cost savings and revenue gains through higher employee production and satisfaction and less “sick” days?  These are only a few of the various economic arguments for moving policies and production toward these green/sustainable concepts

This article is a nice on on “green” terms 101.

I was recently at NEMICE in Boston put on by MPINE.  We set up a booth with some green elements to it and handed out collateral on paper seeded with wildflowers.  It is a very sustainable collateral.  Have recipients read a short story or link (I suggest sending them to your website) and then they can bury the collateral in the ground, water it and hopefully have an even more pleasant vision of your company in the form of perennials.

Our booth attracted a good amount of traffic and we even had people that came up to us and said “I was told to come over to your booth and check it out”.  So, our “green” garden proved to be a great traffic driver.  Not to mention that it was much more pleasant than just standing at a draped table in a concrete bunker.  It brought a little life and cheer indoors.

Almost everyone we met asked us questions about how to be more “green”.  Since I prefer “sustainable”, I usually discussed that point first and then we had some good conversations regarding suppliers, locations, tactics, costs, etc.   Also, this was the first booth I had ever organized and coordinated so, I was able to share my trials and tribulations regarding finding green suppliers for our booth set-up and materials.  Since it was such a time-consuming task, we will be putting together a list of vendors that we worked with and will try to assemble a larger list of products/services for everyone’s benefit.  We are even looking at putting together a “sustainable booth” package.  Most of the standard materials used in booths tend to be pretty toxic, energy consumptive and wasteful (unfortunately).

I am finally getting the feeling that the classic reduce, reuse, recycle is becoming a more commonplace mantra and that you can go almost anywhere on the web and find an article relating to “green” topics.  Good to see that it is officially mainstream even if some of the articles are a little light in content…