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Over the past 10 years we’ve worked with nearly 400 different car clubs, sanctioning bodies, kart clubs, race tracks, and motorcycle clubs, and we’ve picked up a few tips on how to get more drivers attending your events.  We’ll share all the juicy details in our upcoming webinar:

7 Killer Tips on Filling Your Events
Friday, February 22, 2013
10 am PST/ 1 pm EST

It doesn’t matter if you’re running a club race, auto cross, concours, rally, drivers school or anything in between, this webinar will provide you with some tangible action-items that will help fill your event.  Register today to get in on the action!

Our first trip to Canada to participate in the Canadian Motorsport Expo got off to a rough start.  Who knew we were flying into the worst snow storm Toronto has seen in five years?  With 12 inches of snow on the ground and no cabs in sight, trying to get to the show from our hotel was a challenge.  But after a slipperty shuttle ride, a two block hike in the historic snow storm, and a bus ride later, we finally arrived.

The Canadian Motorsport Expo is really geared more towards race fans and enthusiasts, especially for NASCAR and dirt tracks.  In fact Kyle Busch and Michael Waltrip both showed up to screaming fans.  But there were a few road racers out there in the crowd.  Our main objective was to introduce MotorsportReg.com to Canada and get to know some of our fellow exhibitors.  We were successful on both ends.  Between Brian’s presentation on “How to Rule the Web” and our prime booth location between the Canadian Automobile Sports Clubs- Ontario Region and the Vintage Automobile Racing Association of Canada, we met some great people and quickly learned that road racing is alive and well in Canada.

We also had the pleasure of meeting one of our Canadian customers face to face.  Harald from MBCA- Toronto stopped by to say hi and talk about some exciting events his section is working on for this year.  And we were happy to learn that a lot of the racers we met had previously used MSR to register for events just over the border in the US.  So we’re very excited to finally bring the full MSR organizer functionalities (including Canadian dollar processing!) to Canada.

As part of our big Canadian launch this year, we’re hitting the road this weekend with our first official MSR trip to Canada!  Friday, Saturday and Sunday the International Centre in Toronto is hosting Canada’s ultimate racing show, the Canadian Motorsports Expo. You can find us in booth #314, directly across from Canadian Automobile Sports Club- Ontario Region.  We’d love to meet you so stop on by.  We’ll be giving demos, talking to drivers and race fans and soaking up the Canadian motorsport culture.

Also, MSR founder Brian Ghidinelli will be giving his always popular presentation, “How to Rule the Internet- Web & Social Media for Drivers, Car Clubs and Businesses.” You’re guaranteed to pick up a few tips to improve your program from this presentation.   Check the CME schedule for exact time and location.

So if you’re in the Toronto area, come by and say hi!

We’re happy to say that our first webinar of 2013 was a success!  What better way to start off the weekend than by learning how you can save time on event registration in order to do more important things; like perhaps cheer on our local San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl this weekend (go Niners!).

In case you missed it, here’s a brief overview of the 6 Features to Get You to the Finish Line Faster:

1. Private Landing Pages

All organizations on the Premium Plan are entitled to a private landing page with your own URL (yournamehere.motorsportreg.com). This page will always list your current MSR events.  No need to update anything.  We do it all for you!  And if you collect your membership dues using MSR, those “events” will be listed at the top of your page.

2. Deferred Payments

Using deferred payments is similar to using your credit card to book a hotel.  When you make your hotel reservation, you put your credit card on file to hold the reservation. And then once your stay is complete, your card is charged.  This same methodology can be used in MSR for an attendee to book a spot in an event.  Using deferred payments gives you the organizer the flexibility to charge the card whenever you want.  This can save you time from issuing refunds if an attendee cancels.  And generally, people register earlier and more often because there’s no penalty for cancelling which provides you more visibility into who’s attending your events.

3. Elections and Surveys

MSR provides an easy and confidential way for you to hold your elections online.  If you’re currently using paper ballots for your elections, this feature will save you time and money!  And our survey feature allows you to easily ask for feedback from your attendees and members.

4. Google Analytics Integration

Google Analytics does many things, but in general, it monitors your website traffic.  This valuable information can help you determine the best ways to market your events and get more attendees by telling you where your web traffic is coming from and what keywords people are searching for to find you.  You can integrate your events in MSR with Google Analytics which provides a wealth of information.  For example it can help you determine where people are coming from that register for your events.  We’re working on an e-book on how to effectively use Google Analytics and MSR, so keep your eyes posted to our blog!

5. Custom Member Types

Creating your own member types allows you to segment your database of members and then use that information to build reports, send emails or customize your registration form.  Some common member types that our users typically build include: volunteers, stewards, teens, workers, coach, T&S, F&C, solo approved drivers, etc.

6. Membership Validation

Rather than verify your members manually, you can use MSR to do it for you automatically.  We already have system integrations in place with the national organizations of SCCA, BMWCCA, PCA, Audi, and MBCA which makes this process much easier for you.  And if you don’t belong to one of those organizations, you can simply upload a member file to our system and we’ll verify against the file.

7. BONUS- Wordpress/Joomla Plugin

We couldn’t stop at just 6 time-saving features, so we threw in a bonus!  If your website is running on Wordpress or Joomla (60% chance it is) you can use our plugin to automatically list your events on your website.  No need to update or monitor.  The plugin does it all!

To see a recording of the webinar in its entirety, click on this link.  If you’re not already on our Premium Plan and are ready to take advantage of these features to save time in your event registration process, then sign up here and we’ll get you started!

We're kicking off our webinar series this Friday with an in depth look at the best features included in the Premium plan. These are the features our top customers use to make their events more successful.

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.

"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:

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.

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.

While the zero dropping is an Excel issue, this new method embeds a hint in the XLS file saying, "Hey, don't do that!" The trick is to use cascading style sheets (CSS) to let Excel know how you want a particular column in a table (spreadsheet) formatted. We picked up those tips from Niall's Blog.

This improvement eliminates several steps of exporting and opening CSV files and explicitly identifying columns as text. Enjoy doing less - that's that we're after when we make organizing events easier and more fun.