Preparing for event registration

As you finalize your program, the next step is to update your event page on the World IA Day website and prepare to open registration for your celebration. We do have a global registration platform, Eventbrite, and will gladly create a subaccount for your location. Just email us at [e-mail] and let us know if you would an Eventbrite account set up.

To be clear, you are free to use a different registration platform that is perhaps better suited for your local language. We leave this decision up to each local team.

Choosing a Registration Platform

When choosing a registration platform, keep the following in mind:

Registration should be quick, easy and accessible. You want to be sure that someone can register for your celebration from any device and that the experience is not cumbersome or time consuming. In addition, your content and form should support access for people who use assistive technology. We provide tips on how to do this in the ‘Designing the registration experience’ section of this document..

Plan to gather useful data. You will want to collect data that helps you accommodate your attendees and capture historical information for your location. This data can be useful in subsequent years to you or your successors to help give insight and understand trends year over year. This data can also be used to target sponsors, determine venue size, and understand the interests of the local community.

Anonymized attendee data helps us at the global level as well. Data such as the size of our global audience and the profession of our attendees help us to target and secure sponsors at the global level which, in turn, helps us to provide better financial support to our locations.

To gather meaningful data, you will need the ability to create your own data inputs on the form, view or generate reports and export content from the platform throughout the registration period. It also makes things easier if the registration platform offers a way to use one or more mobile devices to check-in attendees the day of your celebration to help you determine actual attendance numbers.

Understand associated fees if selling tickets. If you are charging a nominal fee for your celebration, understand whether there is a fee to accept financial transactions and how it will impact your ticket price. Inclusivity is a core value of World IA Day and we highly encourage you to offer free or deeply discounted tickets to those who may not have the financial means to purchase a ticket at full price. Please review our guidelines about charging admission for your celebration.

It is also helpful to have a waitlist plan should your celebration fill-up. Determine whether you will offer a waitlist, and if so, get a plan together to handle communication with attendees when openings become available.

Below is a list of registration platforms that have been used around the world last year:

• Eventbrite (used globally, we can setup an account for you)

• Peatix (used by Tokyo)

• Timepad (used by Saint Petersburg)

• Ti.to (used by Tampa Bay, Zürich, Los Angeles 2018)

Regardless of what you use for registration, we kindly ask that you keep your official location page on our website up-to-date and add a link to your registration page so people can easily register for your celebration. Adding a link from your registration page to our website also helps bring awareness to our global celebration.

Event payment processing and taxpayer information for US locations

U.S. tax laws require event registration platforms to file a Form 1099-K for U.S. customers who have received more than $20,000 in gross sales and processed over 200 orders.

If you're getting questions from your event registration platform about missing taxpayer information, you can use the IAI tax ID by changing the payment payout to the IAI PayPal account ([e-mail]).

Once your ticket sales have closed, the IAI will give you all funds minus any fees charged by the event registration platform.

Designing the registration experience

When setting up registration, give consideration to the paths people may take to get to your page and present useful information based on each scenario. For example, if the person is coming from your location page on our website or your location’s micro-site, you may want the registration link to take them directly into the registration form since they are likely to have already read about your celebration.

In contrast, a link accessed from promotional channels, such as social media, email or printed marketing campaigns, may lead to a registration page that offers enough information about your celebration to capture their interest and pursue registration.

In any scenario, be sure to keep registration accessible to everyone. Below are a few tips to help.

Use good color contrast Good color contrast is especially for important elements like text, links and buttons. The guideline is that the contrast ratio between the text and background should be at least 4.5:1 (for reference, black on white is 21:1).

Don’t worry if that doesn’t mean much to you – there are a lot of easy, free tools online that you can use for a quick check.

Add alternative text to any images. The most important images on registration sites are functional: buttons, informational icons, or credit card symbols. If you have the ability to enter an alt tag make sure to use a description that helps the person understand it’s meaning or purpose. For example, if there is text in the image, screen readers will not detect it. Repeat it in the alt text. Or, if it’s an icon being displayed, state what it means or what action it might trigger.

Additional tips for coding your own registration form.

If you decide to code your own form be sure to:

• connect labels to each field.

• add a heading row when using tables.

• mark the first row in a table as the heading row. (<th> instead of <td> in HTML). This makes it easy for a screen reader to navigate through the details.

• check the whole page with an accessibility checker. They aren’t infallible, but they can identify many problems people using assistive technology might run into, so you can know about them (and hopefully fix them).

Be sure to offer alternative support if someone has problems registering. Provide a way to get in touch so you can get assist with registration if needed.

Launch and promote registration

We love to promote our locations as registration opens around the world. This is an exciting time! We get to see how locations around the world plan to celebrate World IA Day day. Once you open registration, let us know by tagging us in social media or using our official hashtags (#WIAD18, #WIAD) or drop us a note on Discord. We will gladly help you spread the word.

As with your registration page content and form, keep accessibility in mind as you design your promotional imagery and messaging for registration.

General Tips for Imagery

Be sure to check the size of promotional images and make sure they are readable on smaller screens. If an image is too wide it can stop text from wrapping, making it impossible to see important information on a mobile device. Think about how the image may look when displayed as a thumbnail and also make sure the message comes through with–and without–the image.

Imagery in Email Campaigns

Although many people will allow HTML content in email, many won’t. And the problem gets worse when all of the information is embedded in an image.

Imagine your beautifully designed promotional email coming through as: [ image ] is proud to present [ image ]

This is is not very effective. Even with readable text, it is important not to bury critical information in images without providing an alternative way to read the message.

You should also, include information above or below the image. For example, if a banner is being displayed with your location, the venue and date and time of the celebration, just repeat it in text. If you do this, it will not matter whether the image loads or not, the person will still see information about what, when, where, and how to register.

Imagery in Social Media Campaigns

The same trick can be leveraged when promoting through social media channels. Include both the image and enough text to communicate the message (even in 140 characters).

In 2016, Molly Holzschlag shared a tool with useful functionality and good accessibility. This tool is Buffer’s Pablo app and it can be used to add text to an image you would like to post on social media. It’s quick and easy. The best part is that it automatically inserts the text from the image as text in the message box, making your post accessible with little effort.