Planning Popular and Profitable Overnight Events
| Written by
Elissa Miller | 
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Overnight programs can engage your constituents in a new way. But like any program, you want the administrative process to be as seamless as possible so you can focus on delivering an excellent and unique experience for your visitors. Here are a few ways that Doubleknot can support your overnight events:
- Built-in capacity management and waitlists. Procrastinators may be tempted to register when they see that spaces are filling fast!
- Automatic member benefits like discounts or a buy-one/get-one offers. Besides rewarding your existing members, you can convert registrants to members if the offer is enticing enough! (If you don’t want to offer a monetary discount, you can give members priority registration and/or a special members-only “fast lane” check-in.)
- Custom forms. Overnights can require more liability, waiver and policy agreement forms than other programs—you’ll need the flexibility to create all the forms you need, and to ensure that mandatory forms must be completed before a registration can be submitted.
- Quick check-in. Don’t make your guests stand in a long entrance line, holding their sleeping bags and pillows, impatiently waiting to be checked in. Issue one scannable ticket for each group and assign enough staff to scan tickets and keep the lines moving quickly. If you use Sales Station to check people in, you can also update the number of attendees, add options and collect payment immediately.
- Mobile merchandise sales. You might not want your gift shop to stay open and staffed all night. But, with a mobile sales solution, you can sell a selection of merchandise (specially curated for the event) with an iPad or iPhone and a secure credit card reader.
- Mobile donations. One of the best times to ask for a donation is when the donor is deeply engaged in your mission. While you don’t want to make guests feel constantly pressured to donate on what should be a fun overnight, judicious donation requests and the ability to easily collect donations on a mobile device can be very successful