Open Forum

Happy Monday everyone! We are back with the next Huddle of the Week post.

We all want our events to pull in as many attendees as possible, and sometimes that means that there is a need for an event waitlist. There are tips to help you set up and manage your event waitlists effectively.

1. Use a Waitlist Management Software That's Connected to Your Registration 
2. Set an Automatic Maximum Capacity
3. Customize Communication with Waitlisted Attendees 
4. Automatically Monitor Cancellations and Send Notifications 
5. Track Waitlist Data for Future Success 

Questions for you:
     -What challenges do you face with event waitlists?
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists?

Want to learn more about effectively managing your event waitlists? Check out our Cvent Community blog post - 5 tips for managing Event Waitlists like a pro - today!

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the comment section below!

#HuddleoftheWeek 
#VoiceIt
#Registration

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Megan Clark
Assistant Team Lead, Online Community Marketing
Cvent
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My challenge with event waitlists is the inability to ask questions, unless I missed it. :)
My last event I used custom contact fields to ask a couple questions. I needed to know these answers before moving people off the list.
It allows me to cherry pick.

Also, it there a cap for the waitlist?

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Steven Schlossman
Jack of all trades. Master of none.
BMW Car Club of America
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Questions for you:
     -What challenges do you face with event waitlists?
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists?
Excited to learn about how planners deal with waitlist challenges! 

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Colleen Beck
Director of Sales & Marketing
The Westin Tampa Bay
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     -What challenges do you face with event waitlists?
The constant monitoring for cancellations
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists?
Know your true numbers, and offer a virtual option to allow more attendees. 

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Teresa James
Director of Sales
Aloft Gainesville University AreaUnited States
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If I have an event with multiple sessions I wish I could create a waitlist for each session. I have to have all my sessions filled up before a waitlist will be enabled :(

Example: Event A where you choose from session 1, 2 or 3. If 1 fills up I can't enable the waitlist until 2 and 3 are also filled up. The only work around I found was to create an individual event for session 1, 2 and 3 - 3 links. It can be hard enough to get our team members to use one link to respond. Sending 3 is a lot more work to build and manage from my end too. 

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Megan Ridgway
Sr. Specialist, Internal Events
S&P GlobalUnited States
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 -What challenges do you face with event waitlists? Monitoring for cancellations. 
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists?

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Elizabeth Rathje
Assoc Events Coordinator
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Questions for you:
     -What challenges do you face with event waitlists? not being able to waitlist by registration type
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists? if you have to closely identify who joins from your waitlist utilize event registration approvals.

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Amy Lum
Senior Systems & Tools Specialist
Boston Scientific CorporationUnited States
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I like using Planner Alerts to monitor for cancellations.
Also, prefer using the approval process for moving invitees off a waitlist. 

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Hallie Loeb, HMCC
Event Operations Specialist
CDW United States
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     -What challenges do you face with event waitlists? The Arthrex team struggles with the waitlist being at the event level instead of by registration type.
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists? We created a waitlist registration type and added waitlist text and fields with visibility settings triggered by the waitlist registration type and turn on registration approvals. 

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Tayler Whittaker
Optimization Supervisor, Meetings & Events
Arthrex, Inc.United States
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     - What challenges do you face with event waitlists? monitoring it and ensuring the list is accurate (for example, is someone on the waitlist who can no longer attend, but didn't let us know so we may add them to the event and then find out they can't attend then have to repeat the process for the next person?)
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists? inform waitlisted attendees when they will know if they've been added to the event or not (typically so many days after registration closes).  Have regular emails automatically sent once a week or so to let them know we are still monitoring registrations to avoid them from emailing numerous times to check up.

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Julie-Michelle Davis, CMP
Meetings Manager
Amex GBT - USA
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We rarely use a waitlist, and when we do, it's been easy to manage and is mainly related to ensuring that competitors have not registered for our event. 

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Lori Wildman
Marketing Director
DuCharme, McMillen & Associates, Inc.United States
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     -What challenges do you face with event waitlists?  I struggle with the fact that the waitlist exists at the event level instead of the registration level.  This makes it extremely difficult to manage a hybrid event where the in-person registration type fills up first, but registrants just get an error message when they try to sign up because the waitlist will not engage until the virtual registration type is also full.
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists?  I utilize Planner Alerts to track many registration-related actions including cancellation notification, knowing when a registration path gets close to being full, or when an individual session is full.

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Jess Olcott
Training Program Coordinator
ETC, Inc.
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     -What challenges do you face with event waitlists? I work in Sales for a DMO so do not have events with waitlists. But interested to see what feedback planners have. The only time we might keep a waitlist is when the room blocks run out in Passkey but it is hard to track because so many people in our office answer the Passkey line and attendees make reservations both online and over the phone! We usually just have them call us back to check if there have been any cancellations and don't keep any sort of list.
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists? I am interested to read the planners responses!

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Virginia McCoy
Sales Associate
Visit Savannah
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     -What challenges do you face with event waitlists? When to start clearing the lists and monitoring cancellations
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists? We have custom questions for the events we do have waitlists for where they can input info bout why they want to attend so we can make sure we're picking the most passionate and engaged attendees

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Rachel
NJ
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    -What challenges do you face with event waitlists? Giving the registrant hope that there will be space by asking all of the same questions, so if approved they don't have to go back and register if there is space.
     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists? Stay on top of it, and if there really isn't a chance of space opening up - don't make a waitlist.

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Beth Vriesen.
Events Registration Administrator
Associated Bank Corporation
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     -What challenges do you face with event waitlists?
We usually want to have it set up so that when someone cancels, their spot is filled by someone at the same facility, which has involved a lot of manual reconciliation.

     - What tips do you have to share with your peers on how you manage your event waitlists?
Because of the complication above, we don't have a lot of advice to share

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Elena PEREZ
Communications Coordinator
SEIU - UHWUnited States
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   -What challenges do you face with event waitlists? - That you can't an event wait list by Registrant Type - We would prefer to give our speakers first priority to register. 

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Kayleen VanGelder
Event Technologist
Destination ConsultantsUnited States
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We recently used an event waitlist.  After registration closed, we notified the four people on our waitlist about open spots.  Cvent customer service said don't re-open registration, but our waitlisted attendees were unable to register after they received the notification.  We had to manually register them ourselves.  I'm not sure what went wrong, since I followed the directions given to me by Cvent.  

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Kim Abbott
North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-29-2023 09:50
From: Kayleen VanGelder
Subject: Event Waitlists

   -What challenges do you face with event waitlists? - That you can't an event wait list by Registrant Type - We would prefer to give our speakers first priority to register. 

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Kayleen VanGelder
Event Technologist
Destination ConsultantsUnited States
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We have struggled with waitlists for our largest event. There is not a clear way to automatically register all waitlisted contacts into a paid event without modifying each registration separately. It would be great if we as admins could add the session and leave a balance due as a bulk action.

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Patsy Thompson
Associate Director, Alumni Events & Experience
MIT - Sloan Alumni DivisionUnited States
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