So… I signed in to take a look at the guest registrations this morning and we’re already over 350. Three hundred and fifty. That’s about half what we estimated arrived for PodCamp last year. Three hundred and fifty people. That freaking rocks. And all of this was following a “soft launch” - we never tweeted the site was live and registrations were open - you did. And then you spread it. As one of the people monitoring registrations, I thought I’d take a minute to explain why we went with Guestlist.
Back in the fall when the organizing team started planing this year’s event, one of the earliest decisions we made was to cut the PB wiki - at least from the registration perspective. While PB Wiki (Now PBWorks) has been wonderful to us since the first event in 2006, registrations done via wiki got way too complex last year. First, we had the problem of people vandalizing the page… Then we had the problem of too many people on one page… And if that wasn’t enough, we were getting regular questions about how to edit the wiki. So it was clear, even last year, that the wiki for registrations was out.
So the obvious choice, then, looking at what other tech events and PodCamps were doing was to turn to an event registration app. Looking at all of our options, we chose to go with Guestlist for a number of reasons:
- Registrations were easy for our users
- We could get all of the info we wanted: name, email, URL and Twitter ID
- Data could be exported to formats to make it easier at the registration on event day
- And most importantly - they’re not only Canadian, they’re in Toronto!
So for 2010 we bid a fond farewell to the wiki for our registration needs and a bright hello and welcome to our friends at Guestlist! So far so good, too!
Keep spreading the word and getting friends to sign up to come out - and see you in a few weeks!
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