Event Manager, Higher Logic’s event management platform, is now more powerful than ever. New features added at month's end enhance registration experiences and better support more kinds of events.
From its inception, Event Manager was designed to meet the needs of organizations, their chapters and sections. Interrelated calendars with full registration experiences for the main organization and its subgroups are at the core of the product. Multiple registration choices include RSVP and paid registrations. Multi-tiered pricing allows members and any member type in an AMS/database to receive specialized pricing. When paid registrations occur, the payments are routed directly to the accounts of the chapter/section when desired, keeping the main organization out of the fulfillment role.
So what is new? We interviewed and worked with dozens of organizational staff and volunteer chapter leaders who run events. We gave them (and you) what was asked for.
- Allowing everyone to register with ease
When integrated, a Higher Logic website receives its users from an AMS or other user-providing database platform. While we have always supported user creation for registrants who are not “in the database” many AMS platforms would not facilitate this without direct administrative action. As a result, registration experiences – especially for users who had not yet created an account – were difficult or impossible for some AMS integrations. With this release we overcame multiple AMS-imposed limitations on user creation and carved out a new path to allow users without an account to register or be registered by others more easily.
- A simpler registration experience
Many clients have asked for a “shopping cart registration experience”. We have responded. Higher Logic’s multi-step registration wizard continues to meet the needs of complex events – with multiple purchasable options and tracks/sessions – are needed. But for the majority of organizational events all that power can be overkill. A new “Simple Registration” option will not bring a user away from the main event listing at registration and keeps the user in context during the full registration experience.
- Enhanced payment step
The Event Manager product is fully PCI compliant – more clearly, we never save any payment data to Higher Logic servers. Registrations rely on “payment providers” to perform the actual transaction and then send the registrant details back to Higher Logic to be used in confirmation email and reports. Until now, the payment execution would require the user’s browser leaving the Higher Logic website, performing the transaction on the provider website (often PayPal) and then having the user redirected to the Higher Logic website. With this release we are keeping the user’s experience centered in the Higher Logic website. The payments occur in a provider-site-based modal (a pop-up window) which closes following the transaction conclusion. While Higher Logic still never touches the credit card data a registering user never feels like they left the website.
- More control over options provided to community admins Event Type settings have been expanded to put Super Admins in control over the kinds of events their Community Admins can create. Chapter leaders need not create events of a type that represents your whole organization’s annual meeting. Limiting the types of events that can be created and similar changes to remove unneeded points of configuration from the event creation path streamline and clarify event creation and editing processes.
- More payment providers
We now support Stripe for processing payments. This brings the number of supported providers to three – along with PayPal and CyberSource.
Higher Logic products keep moving forward – responding to client needs and input. While the pace of enhanements has never been faster we look forward to 2016 being even more productive.
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