How pre-approval can help you get the perfect mix of attendees at your events

It’s a nice problem to have, but sometimes your event can be just too popular. There are more people wanting to attend than you can accommodate, so you want to try and maintain as broad a mix of people as possible.

Maybe you’d like some attendees from industry, some from academia, some from the public sector. But if you open registrations without some kind of safeguard in place, you’re in danger of selling all your tickets to just one of those groups and your event isn’t as vibrant as it could have been.

Or, let’s say you’re running a major cybersecurity conference and you want to make sure that a percentage of your tickets are available exclusively to cybersecurity practitioners. So you create a special ticket type and allocate a number of tickets to it – but you want to be sure that attendees buying those tickets really are people working in the field.

Or maybe your event is in the automotive industry, and you want to offer a discount on the ticket price to OEMs. And you don’t want people who aren’t actually from OEMs claiming those tickets and getting the discount.

A nice problem to have is still a problem to be solved. And the answer is pre-approval.

Pre-approval means that a customer starts their registration journey for your event, and you get to decide whether or not they can complete it. You can make an editorial decision for each booking on whether it qualifies for entry, based on your own editorial criteria, and your own timetable. Instead of buying a ticket, people are applying to attend.

Of course, you don’t have to handle the whole event this way if you don’t want to. You could use pre-approval to manage entry only on specific ticket types – those reserved for certain categories of attendee where it’s necessary.

We’ve found that some event technology platforms might promise this, but deliver it in a way that we think is a bit of a fudge: instead of incorporating a real pre-approval process into the main registration flow, attendees register for what’s actually a secondary, shadow event.

Then, any applicants you want to approve need to be copied over from the shadow event to the real one. This might even be a manual process, and has plenty of other issues besides.

AttendZen has a complete pre-approval workflow built-in. If you enable pre-approval on a ticket type, attendees choosing that ticket type are stopped prior to entering their payment data on the last screen of the form, and informed that their registration needs approval before they can continue.

In the back end, you can see a complete list of bookings that are pending approval, view the full details for each, and when you’re ready, decide what to do with that booking – either to accept it, add it to the waitlist, or reject it.

If you accept a booking, the attendee will be emailed a unique link so they can pick up the form right where they left off, make payment if required, and complete their registration. You can even set a deadline on how much time the attendee has to do this.

The ability to move people from pre-approval to a waitlist can be really useful, too. You might not feel you’re able to accept a booking immediately – maybe because you’re expecting more applications from a different industry sector – but you’d like the option of allowing that booking if it turns out there is space available.

Sometimes if you can’t accept a booking in pre-approval, that’s the end of it. But sometimes – especially where you’re just assessing whether the booking qualifies for a discount – you’d like the attendee to still be able to complete their registration, but on a different ticket type. So you can do that too: you can set the pre-approval rejection email to include a button to start a new registration, with all attendee details automatically copied-over from the old one.

And, of course, invitees are automatically exempt. If you’ve sent a personal invitation to someone to attend your event, you’ve pre-qualified them. They’ll be able to complete registration from start to finish, without any further approval needed from you.

None of this is possible by using a shadow event. Instead, AttendZen makes it simple, fast, and completely seamless.