MotorsportReg.com Blog (24)

Kids Just Aren't Into Cars

August 14, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

"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

Revenue Report Breaks it Down

August 14, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

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

Saving Leading Zeros

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

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.

Topics: Features

DoesWhat.com interviews Brian Ghidinelli

August 14, 2013 by Claire Lanyado

INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN GHIDINELLI (MOTORSPORTREG.COM)

MotorsportReg.com Icon

MotorsportReg.com is an online registration management tool for driving and social events.

I interviewed Brian Ghidinelli, MotorsportReg.com founder to find out more. This interview is the hundred and seventh in a series of DW interviews. Big thank you to Brian for the interview!

How would you describe MotorsportReg.com in under 50 words?

We make it easier and more fun to organize and attend motorsport and automotive events. Organizers around the country take online registrations, manage participants and streamline their workflow. Attendees find new events, get registered quickly and have great experiences with their friends and cars without all the red tape.

Describe yourself in one sentence.

I have three passions in life: driving racecars, travel and being an entrepreneur.

Where are you based?

Across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and 15 minutes from one of the most famous racetracks in America, Sears Point/Infineon Raceway.

After college you started, ran and sold an internet consultancy and today run your second start-up, Pukka Software, which developed MotorsportReg.com. What were the main influences that led you to startup?

It’s a combination of a strong work ethic and DIY influence growing up. My father was a partner in an accounting firm and was “the boss”. When I was seven years old, I had my own construction company of Tonka trucks building a subdivision in the garden. In the 6th grade, I bought candy in bulk and resold it at school for a crazy margin. I started a lawn-mowing and yard maintenance business in high school, ran a modem-based bulletin board system and organized an International digital art group. When I got to college, I used my credit card terminal to charge cash-strapped students to get into our house parties. I’ve always had a little hustle in me.

See the complete interview.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Things come up. Plans change. Cars break. A registrar who hasn't received a cancellation or rescheduling request has never organized an event. While many organizations have strict cancellation policies, there are often legitimate reasons for leniency. We know of at least one attendee who wrecked their car on the way to the track, ending their weekend before it started. These are moments of opportunity by being flexible. A credit towards a future event keeps the participant with your organization (and their entry fees) and turns a customer into an advocate.

Now you have to turn policy into action. How do you move their registration to a future event? Or how can you take a season subscription, like for Autocross, and enter the driver in all 10 events after they pay a one-time discounted entry fee? How can you help a busy parent reschedule their teenager's Street Survival entry for a couple of months down the road?

Screenshot of the new copy feature link on the registration screen

Screenshot of the new copy feature link on the registration screen

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.

One of the benefits of MotorsportReg.com is that each event can be configured differently meaning options available for the original event may not be available for future events. That's OK - we automatically try to link up your fees and questions and let you massage them in the event we can't find a match.

For more details, check out the documentation.

Topics: Features

Webinar Recording Posted

August 14, 2013 by Claire Lanyado

photo of guy on a webinar by http://www.flickr.com/photos/rutty/

Our first webinar was a success with 18 organizers coming to pick up tips and tricks from our first topic, "How to Use MotorsportReg.com Faster". Our goal is to improve your user experience and make organizing events easier and more fun. If you would like to view the recording, visit our Webinar Archives.
This is what we covered:

Keyboard shortcuts to help you navigate the site quickly

Making bulk changes to registrations

Saving and tailoring reports

How to send emails to people listed in reports

New Revenue Report

Onsite check in

Registering people manually as an administrator

Finding people who have used MSR but not participated with your organization

Assigning students to instructors

We will be doing more webinars in the future. We welcome your requests for what you would like to learn. You can email us or post your comments below.

Interested in receiving updates on future webinars? Sign up below:

Topics: Webinar

How You Can Be Faster On MSR

August 14, 2013 by Claire Lanyado

We are presenting an interactive webinar series to help you use MSR. Each webinar will have a different subject, with time for questions and answers. This is a great opportunity for you to learn tips and tricks and cover areas where you need help. Brian will speak for about 25 minutes and then answer questions during the second half.

Our First MSR webinar is on July 3, 2012 at 10am Pacific Time / 1pm Eastern Time.

See the agenda below for our first webinar and join us for a great learning experience.

Topics: Webinar

MotorsportReg.com coming to PCA Parade!

June 11, 2013 by Claire Lanyado

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MotorsportReg will be at the 57^th Annual PCA Parade in Salt Lake City starting Tuesday, July 9! We’re coming to support the 34 Regions, 2 Zones and National Office who use MSR today as well as make new friends. Come and visit our booth in the Hospitality Room for a demo of our new online check-in feature or just to say hello and ask questions. We’ll also be showing off our new PCA membership verification (PCA Membership Verification).

We already attended the SCCA and BMW CCA conventions this year and are excited to spend time with the PCA! Salt Lake City is home to many long-time customers including Miller Motorsports Park, Lapping Days and PCA – Intermountain Region.

Topics: Travel

Tracking results for editorial calendars

August 14, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Editorial calendars help you plan what, where and when to post content online

We gave two presentations earlier this year at the BMW CCA and SCCA National Convention on social media strategy for car clubs. One of our recommendations was to use an editorial calendar in order to help plan content and marketing in advance. So long as everything remains in the head of a single volunteer, it's impossible to share the workload. We saw many eyes grow wide with excitement as we talked about scheduling all of the emails, Facebook posts and tweets for an event in one sitting using a social media dashboard like

Topics: Marketing

PCA and BMW CCA Membership Verification

September 9, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

In 2009 we launched our first membership verification service where any organization could upload a file of valid members or participants and validate against it using rules on their registration form. We simultaneously released our first integration to support real-time verification for Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) organizers.

Topics: Features