As the old phrase says, "knowing is half the battle." In the whirlwind life of professional conference planners, this saying couldn't be more true. With site visits to make, vendor contracts to negotiate, and confused registrants calling every two minutes, getting an overview of the meetings season and of the money that's being spent may sometimes feel like an unattainable goal.

Certain Registration helps event planners get control of the big picture by offering information about key meeting factors, and by allowing for strong Consolidation reporting across all events done that year (or multi-year). We offer:

1. A unified and easily navigable Events List that lets you see which events just finished, which are upcoming, where they are occurring, and how many people have registered so far for each.

2. Custom Event data fields to track extra details about each event that you may need, whether it's a departmental code, a travel partner, or the on-site manager's name and phone number.

3. Consolidation reporting that helps you see activity across multiple events at once. How many events did you do by location? How many registrants went to multiple events? What was your average attendance this year vs. last year?

4. Event budgets with General Ledger codes specific to your accounting practices. We let you build your own General Ledger matrix for spend categories and codes, or you can use ours. Then track your projected and actual spend for each meeting, and report on the numbers across events using Consolidation reporting.

In subsequent releases, we will introduce new functionality to help you get even more control. We'll let you track meeting requests and approvals, use an automatic budget estimator to easily build better budget estimates, and assign meeting planner staff to events, all within one set of tools.

Stay tuned to our Certain blog for updates on the latest in our Meetings Management product suite.

I enjoy being a Supplier member of The Society of Government Meeting Professionals (SGMP) and associating with meeting planners from federal, state, and local government as well as other providers of meeting services and facilities.  

Through the Annual Education Conference and Tradeshow, monthly Chapter Meetings, and Special Events, planners and suppliers come together to review the latest trends in meetings management.  It is very rewarding to help meeting planners improve the quality and cost effectiveness of their meetings.

On February 5, I participated in “Achieving Gold” the goal for this year’s National Capital (NATCAP) Chapter‘s 11th Annual Winter Meeting & Tradeshow.  The event included a selection of sessions designed to keep planners and suppliers on top of current issues.

Sessions included “What is Sarbanes Oxley?” an explanation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX ) and how meeting professionals must comply with this law from an ethical standpoint.  For instance, disclosing information that might provide one potential contractor an edge that others do not have; or bundling meeting services such as morning and afternoon breaks, internet fees, gratuities or perhaps even registration fees.  The bottom line is accountability.  Are we as meeting planners and service providers putting ourselves and our partners at risk of an ethical violation of SOX? Read more.    

A very hot and chic session topic was the “Greening” of Government Meetings.  This session demonstrated how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is leading the way by making environmental responsibility a common business practice.  Did I mention the government has an acronym for anything and everything?  EPA is changing their contract acquisition rules to give preference to meeting services and facilities that consume less and manage resources in environmentally positive ways.  These topics were a perfect segue into the Trade Show.  I enthusiastically talked with attendees about the immediate benefits of using Certain Registration to “Go Green”.  Read more.

Mission accomplished.  I Achieved Gold!



David Dzergoski and Jeff Wilson from Certain talk with an attendee about "Going Green."

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As an online registration provider, we strive for 100% availability of our event management software.  This is very difficult to achieve in practice, and we occasionally have outages ranging from a few minutes on all servers to intermittent performance for hours affecting only specific customers.  Our customers' reaction to these hopefully infrequent episodes ranges from understanding ("oh well, I have a lot of other things to do right now - I'll check back later.") to complete outrage ("I'm losing paid registrations!  I have to get this report to the hotel now!").

This article, On-Demand Outages the "New Normal"?, takes the interesting view that as people become more familiar with daily usage of Software as a Service (SaaS) such as our online registration technology, users will realize that these outages are inevitable and they will adjust their expectations and actions during the occasional downtime.  No one is immune to the problem - the article references recent and period performance troubles at major SaaS companies such as Salesforce, Blackberry, and Google Apps.

I remember the early days of Windows when the "blue screen of death" was an unwelcomed part of my daily routine.  Reboot, stand up and stretch, login, get some water, wait for the programs to open, pick back up where I left off.  The blue screen probably did me more benefit ergonimcally by interrupting long sessions slouched over at my PC than they caused me harm - that is, once I learned to control my temper.

I'm not excusing poor performance or saying that we won't get better (as we have in the past).  But maybe we as users need to begin to consider intermittent outages of SaaS as unavoidable and expected, and thus we should create contingency plans for what we will do when they happen (besides freaking out). 

Here's to effective meeting management!

I’m excited that soon we’ll be launching a new set of on-demand training videos for Certain Registration! The first group of videos focuses on registration management topics. Our on-demand videos will help new users hit the ground running as well as offer experienced users the opportunity to refresh their skills with Certain’s online registration software. Meeting planners can watch and interact with the training videos at their convenience. Each video contains narration, animation, interactivity, and chances to review the content at your own pace.

The videos will be available to all Certain Registration customers at no additional charge. As a valued customer, we also supply you with online context-sensitive help, a searchable knowledge base, and live technical support so that you can achieve effective meeting management in no time!