Organize awesome events.Our all-in-one event management software keeps organizers sane & attendees happy.

California's supreme court recently settled Pineda v. Williams-Sonoma Stores, Inc., establishing that zip codes are considered personally identifiable information and may not be collected by merchants as a precondition to a credit card transaction.

At first blush, this sounds like just about every credit card transaction you've made in the past five years however the intent of the law is to prevent merchants from taking a name and zip code and reverse engineering it into a home address for marketing purposes. This is what actually happened to the plaintiff when she shopped at Williams-Sonoma.

The court unanimously determined that the practice violated the Song-Beverly Credit Card Act of 1971 and new legislation was added to the California Civil Code 1747.08. We received a customer inquiry as to whether or not we are subject to this legislation as a California company. The civil code lists just five exceptions to when personally identifiable information may be collected:

(c) Subdivision (a) does not apply in the following instances:

1. If the credit card is being used as a deposit to secure
   payment in the event of default, loss, damage, or other similar
   occurrence.


2. Cash advance transactions.


3. If the person, firm, partnership, association, or corporation
   accepting the credit card is contractually obligated to provide
   personal identification information in order to complete the credit
   card transaction or is obligated to collect and record the personal
   identification information by federal law or regulation.


4. If personal identification information is required for a
   special purpose incidental but related to the individual credit card
   transaction, including, but not limited to, information relating to
   shipping, delivery, servicing, or installation of the purchased
   merchandise, or for special orders.

The first highlighted clause is related to our deferred payment process which, like a hotel guaranty, holds your card on file until a predetermined date or delivery.

The second highlighted clause allows most Mail-Order/Telephone-Order (MOTO) and E-commerce merchants to continue the process of requiring the zip code (and address) in order to perform an Address Verification Service (AVS) match which helps protect the cardholder from fraud in a card not present situation like over the Internet or phone.

Here at MotorsportReg.com, we won't accept a transaction that does not match both address and zip code in order to provide the highest level of security for our users. It may at times be frustrating when a cardholder is absolutely sure their address and zip are correct, and it may require providing some additional personal information, but it's a whole lot better than dealing with a stolen credit card.

I know because my credit card was skimmed in South Africa and then used to rack up about $16,000 of fraudulent charges (including two separate purchases at a KFC for more than $400 - did you know you could even spend $400 at a KFC?!) While we did not need to pay for the goods or fried chicken, it was still a massive hassle.

In this case, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

One of my goals when starting Pukka Software in 2002 was to exceed the level of customer service that I had experienced in dealing with motorsport companies. I can't count how many times I received the wrong brake pads, orders didn't ship on time or parts were missing from a box. Most driving and racing-related businesses are owned by racers who are too busy trying to go racing to commit to quality customer service. That's short-term thinking.

I believe customer service is a sales tool rather than a cost center. Every dollar spent to help existing customers have a positive experience translates to lower churn, better word-of-mouth and stronger relationships leading to easier subsequent sales. It's also more satisfying to have happy customers. So it's internal review time, are we walking the walk? Here are some stats from our email support tool EmailCenterPro:



Let's start with a high-level three-year trend of email volume. Clearly as we add customers, our email volume increases. The blue line represents inbound email (inquiries) while red is outbound (responses). Not every email requires a response and some are simply confirmations so we send slightly less email than we receive. We can see the beginning of 2011 is up compared to 2010 at the same time.

We also calculated the number of inquiries per registration handled and that number is staying constant. This gives us confidence that our support is keeping pace with our growth although there are certainly days at the beginning of the year when it feels like we are drowning in email.



This is our email volume by time of day. We know that people have the disposable income to attend events held by our customers but it doesn't seem like they're working very hard in the middle of the day! Ok, maybe they're just on lunch break. :)

These times are all Pacific so as people wake up on the East coast, we start to field support email until the West coasters shut down for the evening. Technically we provide support from 9-6 Pacific but we often catch up on support email or voicemail after hours which you can see from the "Sent" numbers.



Over the course of the year, we have several hot spots: the beginning of the season when organizers have their dates and are getting their events set up. We are also bringing on new customers, providing training, reviewing events and so on. This is a busy, busy time for the team.

As people get into their groove, things taper off slightly with a low point in June. For once, everyone is actually at the track or course or get together so they are out having fun and away from the computer. Then we experience a very mild second wave as people and organizers run their end-of-season events.

Once the cold weather and snow starts setting in across the country, things go nearly radio silent with the exception of some events in the Southern part of the country and annual parties, banquets and award ceremonies. We also see a lot of indoor karting events as groups try to stave off the winter blues.



This is the chart of which I'm most proud. Without taking into account nights and weekends when we're trying to keep our significant others and our cars happy, our average email response time over the past 30 days is just 42 minutes. We're bringing on tons of new customers, handling more registrations and payments than ever before (we set two records for single day and monthly volume in 2011 so far) and yet most people wait only 42 minutes for a response regardless of the time of day they contact us.

Because of our fee structure, we are financially incentivized to help our organizers have the biggest, most successful events possible. Since we don't charge per-event fees or support fees or flat per-registration fees, the only way for us to succeed is for our customers to succeed. Let me be blunt: this isn't cheap. It requires dedicated, knowledgeable people. It means tactfully dealing with some of the Type A personalities that can be found in the paddock. It also requires going beyond just answering the question to making a consultative recommendation on the best way to address a situation. Major kudos go to Ann for leading this charge.



As if the unadjusted chart wasn't impressive enough, this final chart shows the past 12 months adjusted for business hours. Between 9-6 Pacific time, Monday through Friday, the average email was answered in a blistering 17 minutes!

Yes, support is expensive and it's a place where companies can cut costs by going overseas or reducing staff. But in speaking with customers, particularly for our market where so many of our users are part-time volunteer staff, great customer service is a key selling point and differentiator. Of course, anyone can sell it, but these charts prove we're following through.

As a small tech company, we have opted to build a lean operation focused on steady growth with low churn rather than a high-churn, marketing-heavy customer explosion. While many startups may want eyeballs quickly so they can flip their project, we're building for a long-term sustainable operation.

TOPEKA, Kan. (Jan. 19, 2011) – Sports Car Club of America today named MotorsportReg.com, the largest event registration and management service for automotive events, the "Official Registration System of SCCA."

Beginning with the 2011 season, SCCA will utilize MotorsportReg.com for online event registration for Tire Rack® SCCA Solo National Tour and Tire Rack SCCA ProSolo National Series events, as well as the SCCA National Championship Runoffs® at Road America.

"We elected to make the change to MotorsportReg.com for 2011 to make event registration easier for all of our participants," SCCA VP of Membership Colan Arnold said. "We tried other online systems in the past, and considered an in-house system, but it was clear that the benefits of MotorsportReg.com outweighed what we could do with our resources. We’re confident that participants in our National events and the regions who use their service will see the benefits of the system."

MotorsportReg.com is the largest and best-supported option in the marketplace geared specifically to online registration for motorsports events, allowing SCCA to focus time and resources away from pre-event registration and onto other aspects of the event. MotorsportReg.com will also serve as the registration system for SCCA Pro Racing series in 2011.

"Using our technology and insight into motorsports will help SCCA deliver tools to its Regions and members that are otherwise cost prohibitive or require lengthy implementation," MotorsportReg.com CEO Brian Ghidinelli said. "The wide variety of customers we deal with helps us deliver a tailored solution that improves the registration experience for the 45,000 SCCA members and volunteers."

About SCCA
Founded in 1944, Sports Car Club of America, Inc. is a 45,000 member motorsports organization that incorporates all facets of autocross, rally and road racing at both club and professional levels. It annually sanctions over 2,000 events through its 114 regions and professional subsidiary. Landmark events and series for the Club include the SafeRacer SCCA National Racing Series; the Club Racing National Championship Runoffs® at Road America; and The Tire Rack® SCCA Solo National Championships and ProSolo Championship at Lincoln, Neb. For more information, please visit www.scca.com.

About MotorsportReg.com
MotorsportReg.com makes event management fun with nothing to install and simple, pay-as-you-go pricing. Organizers from major motorsport corporations and non-profit enthusiast groups use the platform to manage, promote and sell out driving and social events across North America. Customers include SCCA Pro Racing, Miller Motorsports Park, BMW Car Club of America, Porsche Club of America and Road America.

Ann braved an upstate New York trip late last year to pow-wow with the Northeast Division of the SCCA and present MotorsportReg.com to their administrators. We were competing head-to-head with another registration vendor so we're extra excited to share their announcement this week to transition from their in-house registration service to MotorsportReg.com:

After more than 10 years, the NESCCA on-line registration system has been discontinued. It served us well, but it needed substantial upgrade in order to continue.

After presentations by two vendors at the recent NEDiv MiniCon, each region independently selected the vendor that they will use during the upcoming year. At this time, New England, Glen, New York, Mahoning Valley, Finger Lakes, Steel Cities, Mohawk Hudson, and Northern New Jersey will be using MotorsportReg.com.

Two regions in the division will continue to use their existing third-party vendor at this time. We want to send a huge thanks to the NEDiv folks for their hospitality and for their selection of MotorsportReg.com. We're building the biggest and best set of tools for event organizers and will work hand-in-hand with the division to provide a smooth transition.

We'll be at the SCCA National Convention in Las Vegas next month so if you're a new MotorsportReg.com user or still using one of those other systems, come chat with us to learn how we can help improve your life and the lives of your drivers and workers.

It's been quiet on the public front here although we've been working like elves behind-the-scenes to make sure Santa has something in his bag for Christmas. Lots of plumbing work has been performed in preparation for allowing one account to register someone else (an oft-requested feature) and we're staggering our releases to push some of that groundwork early. The big anchor of this upcoming release is customizable member types! No longer will you be restricted to Driver and Instructor; organizations using the premium plan will be able to have up to 32 member types that can track anything from interests to credentials. This feature will greatly enhance our membership management capabilities as well as permit greater tailoring of registration forms for the participants.

[gallery link="file" columns="4"]

Beneath the sheets we've done a major upgrade to the way that we collect, process and store club, event and survey questions. They will all share the same capabilities which means club and event questions will get new likert scales and essay box answer types, regular-expression pattern matching for answers and it has support to limit the visibility of any one of these types to the custom membership types described above.

Also coming is the capability to restrict a future credit to one event type. If your organization runs different kinds of events in a single account with MSR, you can now give a participant a credit that will only be good for that same kind of event in the future.

Finally, we added the ability to get a list of postal codes (American and Canadian) within a radius of a specified location via our REST API. You can use this to filter event listings or other geocoded data by distance and we'll be adding more geospatial support to the API in time.

Expect to see the above features live in the next week or so. We'll be updating our documentation accordingly.

Hot off the PRWeb wire, you can read the big news today: MotorsportReg.com is now the official registration service of the Tire Rack Street Survival program! This means a great deal to me personally; I have instructed at many Car Control Clinics with my local BMW CCA chapter which is where the idea for Street Survival originated. To see the improvement in skills and confidence of drivers with whom I share the roads on a daily basis is a real reward. Looking back on the kind of driver I was as a teen, I know how important this program is and we're thrilled to be supporters. On to the official announcement...

MotorsportReg.com Teams with Tire Rack Street Survival® to Reduce 5,000 Annual Teen Driving Deaths with Streamlined Online Event Registration

Los Gatos, CA - October 19, 2010 – Partnering to teach teens the skills they need to stay alive behind the wheel, MotorsportReg.com now powers Tire Rack Street Survival® online registration. The community-run schools teach local students to better control their vehicles through hands-on experiences in real-world driving situations. As the largest event registration and management service for automotive events, MotorsportReg.com delivers greater capabilities and cost savings over the previous in-house system.

"Few people realize driving is one of the most dangerous things they do on a daily basis," said Bill Wade, National Program Manager, Tire Rack Street Survival. "A car traveling at just four miles per hour has more energy than a bullet. That’s a lot of responsibility. MotorsportReg.com helps the local heroes who host our program to reach more students and it costs us less. This enables a small band of dedicated people to concentrate on teaching teens how to be safer on the road."

"MotorsportReg.com helps the local heroes who host Tire Rack Street Survival schools reach more students and it costs us less."

Distributed as web-based software, MotorsportReg.com gives event organizers complete control over a single event or an entire season with tools to promote, register and track participants. Recent social media support for Facebook and Twitter helps organizers reach more potential attendees ensuring successful sold out events.

"As a volunteer driving instructor myself, I have been an advocate for continued driver education and a long time supporter of the Tire Rack Street Survival program," said MotorsportReg.com founder Brian Ghidinelli. "Knowing we deliver on making it easier and more fun to organize events for such an important cause is great, but the real benefit is that even more teens will learn these critical driving skills thanks to reduced costs and support from our customer service team."

About MotorsportReg.com
MotorsportReg.com makes event management fun again with nothing to install and simple, pay-as-you-go pricing. Organizers from major motorsport corporations and non-profit enthusiast groups use the platform to manage driving and social events across North America. Customers include Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) Pro Racing, Miller Motorsports Park, BMW Car Club of America (BMW CCA), Porsche Club of America, Audi Club North America and Ferrari Club of America.

About Tire Rack Street Survival
Tire Rack Street Survival classes are conducted by local member volunteers from regional chapters of the BMW CCA, the SCCA and other car clubs. Students, driving their own vehicles, are supervised at all times by experienced, knowledgeable driving coaches. In 2009, 79 communities signed up to benefit 1,899 students and 90 schools are planned for 2010. Community leaders or concerned parents interested in requesting a Tire Rack Street Survival school for their community can visit streetsurvival.org.

For more information or to schedule an interview with Brian Ghidinelli or Bill Wade, please visit Pukka Software, call Ann Maycock at 415.462.5603 or email us.

We have some new features and updates we want to share that will benefit a few different types of customers. Lots of little tweaks ahead of our bigger end-of-year updates that will be coming.

Social Media

Added direct Facebook "Like This" button to event listings and dashboard. When someone clicks the button, a note about the event is added to their stream which may be displayed to their friends and aid in event promotion. In the example to the right, my name and the names of any of my friends who have also liked the event will be displayed while people not in my Facebook network will be listed as "and X others". This is customized based upon the viewer by Facebook directly. If the viewer is not logged in to Facebook, it will simply state the number of people who have liked the event.

Surveys & Elections

• Voter report - Election result pages now list who voted along with member number; the actual vote is still kept secret. If alternative forms of votes are accepted such as paper ballots, this enhancement allows organizations to self-audit individuals are only voting once.


• Proper multi-pick tallies - If you have questions which accept multiple answers, you may have seen results in your bar charts like "Answer1,Answer2" alongside "Answer1" and "Answer2". We now properly tally them individually.

msreg.us

We saw the first use of the new msreg.us URL shortener in the wild for Asphalt Ventures "Tryptophan Recovery Plan" event at VIR after Thanksgiving. The shortened URL doubles as a hashtag for your social media and email campaigns where long URLs may wrap or take up otherwise valuable space. This feature is part of our Premium plan and is a springboard for future social media promotion tools and hooks we plan to release. If your eyes didn't gloss over at yet another mention of social media, consider reading our recent post on Your Car Club Facebook Strategy.

Reports

• Redeemed credits report - gives treasurers a list of all redeemed credits, amounts and dates. Complements our outstanding credits report for a complete picture of financial liabilities.


• Unique ID - Added new auto-generated unique ID to member profiles which is now available in all reports. Use this ID for barcodes (such as for Autocross timing and scoring) or integration with third party systems where you need a consistent unique identifier. The value will be the same for each attendee regardless of which organization they are participating with so you can count on it being unique across MotorsportReg.com.


• SCCA Tech form prints on one page - Our production servers were scaling the full-page official SCCA tech form leading to blank pages between each form and wasting paper. That's not very Californian of us! Tech details available here for the morbidly curious.


• Numeric precision increased - Numeric answers to custom or club questions now display up to 10 digits instead of 6 and padding has been eliminated.

General

• Venue Maps - added regional maps to event listings and dashboards to help visually orientate event locations. If the user is logged in, clicking the map will give them driving directions from their address (on file) to the venue.


• Generate usernames for organizer-created accounts - when organizers create a profile for an attendee who registers by mail, phone or on site, we do not automatically create a username and password. This led to confusion when the participant tried to register and found their email address already in the system but that they don't have a username. We now automatically generate default login credentials as part of the password recovery process for these profiles.

Form Builder & Registration Form

• Error handling - Improved error handling and alerts if an item cannot be reordered or deleted


• Number pool performance - Improved performance of number pools on registration form for attendees, renders faster now

API

Provided complete PHP example with caching for listing a calendar of events.

"You have to make a commitment to view [Facebook] as a critical part of your business. Everyone from the CEO to whoever scrubs your floors has to be on board with the fact that these are your customers, and this is how they want to communicate in this day and age. It requires an investment of finances, time, or both. If you treat this as another store, branch, or office in your organization and accept that these are your real customers, your odds of success go up dramatically."

From growing Facebook leads by 4200% comes an interesting case study on raising the impact of a company's Facebook presence to drive actual sales. Replace "business" with "club" and "sales" with "entries" and think about how it applies to your organization.

My favorite part is the emphasis that this is how people want to communicate in this day and age. If you're not talking in those channels, they can't hear you. This is especially true for younger people who are the future lifeblood of every volunteer organization. We're working to make it easier.

Is Facebook or other social media part of your official club strategy?

While social media like Facebook is not new to most of you, the nuances of Twitter and, more specifically, hashtags may be. "Tags" are a Web 2.0 method of arbitrarily classifying content rather than selecting predefined categories from a controlled list. The unstructured define-it-as-you-go approach gives control to the user over the server and is the system de rigueur of many popular web sites such as Gmail and Flickr. A hashtag can be thought of as a "social tag", or one that helps people interested in a common topic more easily find and consume related content. It might mean tweets on Twitter, photos on Flickr or bookmarks on Delicious.

Hashtags are most closely associated with Twitter but their concept is simple: create a short, memorable string preceded by a hash (#) that can be used to identify related content across one or more web sites or services. For example, my first real experience with Twitter was the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. Having visited India, I wanted to know what was going on and the mainstream media coverage was fragmented and repetitive. Searching Twitter for the hashtag "#Mumbai", I followed a constantly updating stream of everyone talking about the terrorist attacks including many people on the ground with cell phones in Mumbai.

How does this apply to you? Last night we introduced a two-in-one feature for hashtags and permalinks for Premium plan customers. Set on the Basic Settings screen, each event can have a short, unique identifier to be used both as a hashtag and a URL shortening service with our new domain msreg.us:

http://msreg.us/YourHashTag

By promoting a single hashtag, you and your participants can easily find content posted anywhere about the event on services such as Twitter, Flickr and elsewhere. These shorter URLs will also fit better into tight spaces like Twitter's 140-character limit and are unlikely to wrap in your emails. Compared to our current URLs, the msreg.us version is as much as 75 characters shorter and points to the same place as the longer link.

Ok, maybe you're saying to yourself, "can I walk before we run?" We realize a lot of organizations still struggle with their web site let alone have a Facebook fan page or Twitter account, but that's exactly why you need to pay attention to these trends. These aren't just for heavy Internet users, they're vehicles you can be using to talk with both the current and next generations of your club. Few things get people as impassioned as motorsports so use these tools to maximize your voice. Start with the easier to remember, copy and type shortened URLs and then start thinking about how to promote the hashtags in your event literature and your social media postings.

In addition to making things easier for you, we're also making it easier for attendees to share and recommend your events on various services using the AddThis module and, starting today, the Facebook "Like" button. Anyone with a Facebook account can now "Like" your event which in turn may notify their friends and spread the word about your event and organization.

Want some ideas on how to use a hashtag to reach out and grow an audience? This talk by Baratunde Thurston titled There's a hashtag for that from Web 2.0 Expo last year may help. Warning: some NSFW language in the video.



In addition to a social media user, Thurston is also a comedian and editor at The Onion. You'll certainly laugh and, like me, wonder at first how this talk is relevant. But! Listen to the recaps and consider what might happen if you could reach out to a wider audience and one that might not be immediately aware of you but could be interested in what you do. If Thurston can make the swine flu funny, odds are you can reach just about anyone with your message.

Think before you leap but get a toe out there and get started!

With just 24 hours remaining in July this post is coming down to the wire. This installment of Bits & Pieces brings some notable enhancements for July. We've already teased a few of them but the previously unmentioned updates will also make lives easier for attendees and organizers alike.



First up is a change that allows attendees to update their credit cards or bank accounts on file. Since adding deferred payments last year, we've struggled with how to permit accounts to be added, updated and removed while still ensuring that organizers have a valid account on file at all times.

Now under the "Billing" tab, any account on file may be removed so long as it is not the account of record for a current registration. If so, the attendee will have to replace it first using the new update link.

Also new to the payment system is our previously announced refunds capability. Now send money back to the original account using the new refund button to any transaction from an event that has ended in the past 90 days. Beyond that, transactions will be locked.

The form lets you perform full or partial refunds. Unlike regular transactions where the fee is subtracted from the total, for refunds we add the fee on top of the amount. This ensures that you can easily specify how much money should be returned to the account without doing any math. We display your cancellation policy alongside the form making it easy to determine what applies in each individual case.

Refunds are currently being tested by a few customers and initial tests are going well. We'll be making it generally available soon.

The venerable CKEditor has been our WYSIWYG editor for several years now and is loved by all... except when it comes to pasting from Microsoft Word. The truth of the matter is that Word is a real pig of a generator but as the desktop standard few people are willing to switch to something better. Instead, the latest CKEditor 3.3 has a vastly improved MS Word paste feature that strips out the illegal and irrelevant HTML that Word generates behind the scenes. This has several advantages including making your pages smaller (and faster), being more compatible across browsers and generally being easier to work with.

Two great new features are SCAYT (Spell check as you type) and the Search/Find/Replace feature, both highlighted in the screenshot above. For misspelled words, a red squiggly line is displayed and options are provided to correct your error. Well, not your error but someone else's error. Because you never make mistakes, right? :)

Finally, we added a few new attendee and assignment reports to help new organizers jumpstart their reports. Few of our built-in reports include the custom data collected by organizers in the form of event and club questions. These new reports should help organizers see additional ways of including and filtering their data as they analyze and prepare for their events.