On Friday, we pushed a significant change to our email blaster which has a major impact on how you send email from MotorsportReg and (hopefully) a minor impact on how you receive responses to those emails.
April 19, 2014
On Friday, we pushed a significant change to our email blaster which has a major impact on how you send email from MotorsportReg and (hopefully) a minor impact on how you receive responses to those emails.
Topics: Misc
April 9, 2014
You have likely received a number of emails or seen blog and social media posts regarding security vulnerability CVE-2014-0160 which is being called the Heartbleed Bug. It affects OpenSSL, an underlying library which encrypts information sent across 60% of the Internet. It's what powers the "S" in https:// when you access secure web sites so you see the lock icon in your web browser.
August 15, 2013
Beginning today, the BMW Car Club of America is holding their annual Oktoberfest at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. This 5-day extravaganza includes driving events such as car control clinics, driving schools, and autocrosses, as well as social events including BBQ's, wine tasting and a casino night.
I've instructed with the Golden Gate Chapter in the past and jumped at the chance to instruct during the HPDE event at Oktoberfest. Many of our customers are BMW CCA regions and this will be a great opportunity for me to meet our newer customers and reconnect with our older ones. And let's face it, it's hard to pass up the chance to drive Laguna Seca.
Topics: Travel
August 13, 2013
For the past few weeks we have been quietly testing some enhancements to the registration form. Co-Driver Pickers, while not glamorously named, let attendees indicate when they are sharing a vehicle with another participant so you, as the organizer know about it. Text Blocks, one of the form layout options, let you embed rich text including links and photos anywhere on the registration form for more descriptive text and endless merchandising opportunities.
Topics: Features
August 14, 2013
Happy new year! If you've ever seen a rally course book, you might be familiar with Tulip diagrams. The people at Long Haul Software have designed a iPhone/iPad Roadbook Editor that draws and shares diagrams for building route notes.
Topics: Misc
August 14, 2013
"The younger generation just isn't into cars like we were." I've heard three variations of this in the past two weeks from car club leadership. It stems from a shortage of young enthusiasts turning up to events so the knee-jerk reaction is that it must not be the product on sale but rather the consumer has changed. I'm not so sure I agree. Allow me to present exhibits A, B and C:
Topics: Marketing
August 14, 2013
Whether you're a professional or volunteer event organizer, everyone wants to know the bottom line at a glance. Some organizations think about it in terms of cars, others in terms of entries and some groups have more complex formulas for what constitutes break even. While we can't intuit your revenue model, we can make it easy to apply our numbers quickly to whatever model you use.
We have long had the event financial report (a breakdown of who paid and how much) and an ordered inventory report (what people bought). The former shows each and every transaction for an event (both online, like credit cards, as well as offline, like cash and check), while the latter shows a summarized tally of what each attendee ordered. The confusion occurs when organizers combine these two data sets, because one reports a summarized total by attendee while the other shows a per-transaction level of detail. If you combine them, you're likely to get duplicate inventory lines and the totals don't match.
A better financial summary was in order, but we heard loud and clear that organizers didn't want to look at multiple reports so we built a new "Event Revenue, Packages, & Inventory" financial report. By attendee, it shows (1) payment totals by type, (2) total revenue and fees, (3) packages ordered and (4, not shown) inventory items those packages contain. From the simplest to most complex event, this report now tells you everything you need to know about the financial and logistical aspects of your event.
Topics: Features
June 11, 2013
Raise your hand if you've opened a report in Excel before that contained leading zeros only to find them disappear. Everyone? Yup, that matches our experience as well. Good news! Through some trickery, we've taught Excel to open our reports and treat certain columns as text instead of numbers. Leading zeros from vehicle numbers, transponders and zip codes will no longer appear on the back of milk cartons.Topics: Features
June 11, 2013
Enter our new attendee copy feature. Whether you want to copy the registration details to one event or ten, you can quickly select and migrate all of the details to future events. Topics: Features
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