Registration Regrets

Retreat Registration should be a relatively easy task. You give people forms. People fill out forms. People return forms with money. Once all the forms are in, you enter all the information in to a spreadsheet or database. Once the database is created, future registrations should be cake, requiring very little in terms of database manipulation.

Once the master list is in, you get the floor plans from the school and start assigning rooms. In previous years, I asked for the kids' grades so I could put people of similar age groups around each other. Last year was a blazing success, in terms of the youth. This year, it's a different story.

The forms that we had this year were terrible. The flow of information to be put down was illogical and confusing. Forms should be straight forward with a logical progression of data. The form should also convey all relavent information to the user as well. There were also vital fields that were not included in the original registration form.

This past Sunday, we spent about 3 hours assigning rooms. To make this process faster, I volunteered to do data entry so if we had to make changes later, it would be simple and straight forward. I did my best to give the final list to people so they could double check it.

It turns out, that they went ahead and made other changes, but not to the master list. Instead, they made seperate sheets for each floor. This would be fine had they updated the database as well. Needless to say, I've spent almost half the day working on just getting things logical.

As you can see, what was supposed to be a simple process, became this huge endeavor. It wasn't any single particular mistake, but a culmination of cutting corners and lack of experience.

If I were in charge of the registration process, things would be different.