We’ve been working with Rick Recht and his Songleader Boot Camp team for over 3 years now. They came to Regpack in need of a conference registration solution to make registration and data management for their national and regional conferences more efficient and professional.
Hi Rick! Tell me a bit about yourself, and about Songleader Boot Camp.
Rick Recht, Founder and Executive Director of SLBC
I’m the Founder and Executive Director of Songleader Boot Camp, which is a national leadership training immersion program that serves the Jewish world, including Jewish educators, Rabbis, Cantors, worship leaders, songleaders, camp professionals, family engagement professionals and more. We launched 8 years ago and we have a national conference and regional conferences. Our goal is to provide a holistic guide to powerful and effective, engaging interactive leadership for all walks of life.
What process were you using before Regpack for registration? What made you ultimately decide to work with Regpack for your conference registration?
When we started the conference, we were utilizing remedial technology to keep track of registration and a number of other logistical data that we needed to collect from participants. It was insufficient and it was inefficient. We knew there had to be a better way. Then, we found Regpack.
It’s been really great for us because I feel like Regpack has grown with us. Regpack has expanded its offerings significantly in the last few years. Along with customer service, we feel like we have a partnership with Regpack.
Regpack immediately was a step up for us on a technological level, but over the last few years it’s continue to progress and meet our needs both technologically and in terms of customer service. We’ve put in various requests over time and we’ve seen them appear in the technology, which has been great. It’s made us feel like Regpack is a company we can grow with, not grow out of.
It’s been really rock solid for us, a rock solid piece of technology. And when we’ve had any kinds of issues, we’ve had really quick customer support. Regpack has really addressed our micro needs very quickly so it doesn’t interrupt our workflow, which is critical when we’re in a conference marathon. There’s no time to stop. When people are registering actively and there’s any kind of issue, we need it addressed immediately. We’ve found that we can count on Regpack to make it happen.
You use many of Regpack’s email tools. Can you explain how you use these features and how they have impacted your workflow?
We use Regpack’s email communication tools to send out welcome letters, logistic letters to participants letting them know what to bring, etc. We use it for invoicing as well and to send out information to sponsors of participants. It’s been a very simple and easy way to keep in touch with everyone. And it’s been extremely easy to apply.
A major advantage of working with Regpack has been once we set it up, we can replicate and then fine tune and grow from year to year. It gets easier and more efficient every year that we use the software. Not starting from the beginning every year, is good to know if you’re a conference organizer looking for registration software. It’s the not the case of some technology out there. I’ve worked with other companies where I can’t believe we can’t duplicate something. I think, seriously, we need to set this up again? But that’s not the case with Regpack. We just duplicate, fine tune and grow.
How are you using Regpack’s reporting tools?
Our application captures a lot of data from our participants including dietary needs, medical needs, transportation needs, accommodation needs, financial details, and more. We need to and generate reports throughout the conference cycle that includes all of these data points. The export of data from Regpack is super simple. And it’s really essential. It’s made it very easy to keep track, holistically, of all of the needs of our participants. And its organized in a way that is efficient and applicable to our specific needs.
What are the biggest benefits you’ve seen since using Regpack?
The biggest benefit is the relatively simple and efficient way to not only provide a professional point of entry for our conference attendees, but for us as an organization to capture large amounts of data, and to organize it in a way that is immediately useful for our company.
It was important to us that we make a professional first impression on our attendees. And the very first thing they see besides our website, is our application, which is Regpack. The ideal thing with a registration process is that a person should never be distracted or halted by the technology itself. And we can count on Regpack to make that a very smooth and invisible process.
If you were speaking with other conference organizers or other Jewish professionals hosting similar events, would you recommend Regpack’s conference registration solution to them? Why?
One thing that I didn’t mention was the cost of using Regpack. I’m thrilled! We found with Regpack, that it had exactly what we needed and no more than we needed.
I’ll say it like this, while there are other technological registration solutions that exist out there, Regpack really met our needs providing a basic yet sophisticated conference registration system at a low cost, with high customer service. It really met our needs and I imagine would be the needs of the majority of conference providers in the Jewish world.
Cost is a big thing for us. We’re a small company. There were a couple other providers who provided some stuff that we didn’t need, they were really expensive and they charged according to a pricing model that made no sense for us. It was almost working against small companies! We can barely justify having the system we have, but we can because of he cost and efficiency of it. The time we save not doing a lot of the manual registration work, justifies the cost of the system completely for us.
If you want to learn more about Regpack’s conference registration solution, request a free demo today!