Creating a Custom Webform: How America's Car Museum Customized Their Registration
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Guest Post from Kathleen Magness, Donor Database & Prospect Research Coordinator for LeMay Museum: America's Car Museum
America’s Car Museum hosts an annual event called, Vintage Motorcycle Festival: The MEET at ACM. At this event, more than 2,500 classic motorcycle enthusiasts gather together on the ACM’s Haub Family Show Field to view hundreds of vintage motorcycles and scooters ranging from 1910 to 1990. At this event, virtually every brand in the history of motorcycling is represented from owners across the U.S. and Canada.
Every participant who registers to show their motorcycle can show up to 6. Their motorcycles fall into one of 18 judged classes. What we needed from Altru was the ability to sell general admission tickets to the event as well as register the participant’s motorcycles. To do this,I created two events in the scheduled program occurring around the same time (motorcycle check in begins before we allow people onto the field) at different locations – that way the e Tickets will direct general admission attendees to the field and participants to check in.
Signing up to participate in the event costs $20.00, regardless of how many motorcycles you choose to show. I was advised by Altru support staff to use a scheduled program so that I can create a registration form with custom questions the registrant would have to fill out. These questions are a combination of dropdown lists and text type.
We wanted for each registration to be a count of each unique motorcycle, rather than each registration a count of how many people were participating. Instead of having unique price types for the number of motorcycles each participant would be showing, Jessica Lee suggested that I set up an automatic discount that would be applied up to 5 times. The participant now uses the quantity box to enter the number of motorcycles being registered and they will be charged only once. This also allows for us to use the ticket number as a unique identifier for each motorcycle at the event.
What became problematic with this is that Altru web forms are set up to register people, not motorcycles. Some of the verbiage was confusing and the automatic subtotal feature was showing the price before the discount. Our registrants would have to add their registrations to the cart before seeing that they are only being charged $20.00. In addition to this, the shopping cart page had a note about the amount of discount applied, which we found to be confusing for the participant as well.
Most of the customization that we did for this page were available through the “Manage Event Registration Forms” built in features by clicking “options” and then navigating to the “Language” tab. We set up custom price type headings, a custom ticket quantity error message, and custom button titles. For the changes that weren't available, I used the Altru Web-Forms A-Z guide and some help from our graphic designer to edit the CSS style sheets to edit out the unwanted information within the page designer. We changed the font color of the subtotal to white (which is our website background) and hid the discount verbiage that appears in the shopping cart. Now we have a beautiful web form that we can use to register the motorcycles!
Check out the web form here. And feel free to play around with it! Enter a number in the quantity box (2-6) to see the registration questions or enter a number of 7 or more and click register to see our customized error message!
In addition to this web form being totally awesome, our registration list is going to be used in conjunction with a query and export definition to create a merge document so that we can print the display signs for each motorcycle (which lists all the answers to the registration questions) in one big batch rather than manually creating 400+ as we had to do last year.
America’s Car Museum hosts an annual event called, Vintage Motorcycle Festival: The MEET at ACM. At this event, more than 2,500 classic motorcycle enthusiasts gather together on the ACM’s Haub Family Show Field to view hundreds of vintage motorcycles and scooters ranging from 1910 to 1990. At this event, virtually every brand in the history of motorcycling is represented from owners across the U.S. and Canada.
Every participant who registers to show their motorcycle can show up to 6. Their motorcycles fall into one of 18 judged classes. What we needed from Altru was the ability to sell general admission tickets to the event as well as register the participant’s motorcycles. To do this,I created two events in the scheduled program occurring around the same time (motorcycle check in begins before we allow people onto the field) at different locations – that way the e Tickets will direct general admission attendees to the field and participants to check in.
Signing up to participate in the event costs $20.00, regardless of how many motorcycles you choose to show. I was advised by Altru support staff to use a scheduled program so that I can create a registration form with custom questions the registrant would have to fill out. These questions are a combination of dropdown lists and text type.
We wanted for each registration to be a count of each unique motorcycle, rather than each registration a count of how many people were participating. Instead of having unique price types for the number of motorcycles each participant would be showing, Jessica Lee suggested that I set up an automatic discount that would be applied up to 5 times. The participant now uses the quantity box to enter the number of motorcycles being registered and they will be charged only once. This also allows for us to use the ticket number as a unique identifier for each motorcycle at the event.
What became problematic with this is that Altru web forms are set up to register people, not motorcycles. Some of the verbiage was confusing and the automatic subtotal feature was showing the price before the discount. Our registrants would have to add their registrations to the cart before seeing that they are only being charged $20.00. In addition to this, the shopping cart page had a note about the amount of discount applied, which we found to be confusing for the participant as well.
Most of the customization that we did for this page were available through the “Manage Event Registration Forms” built in features by clicking “options” and then navigating to the “Language” tab. We set up custom price type headings, a custom ticket quantity error message, and custom button titles. For the changes that weren't available, I used the Altru Web-Forms A-Z guide and some help from our graphic designer to edit the CSS style sheets to edit out the unwanted information within the page designer. We changed the font color of the subtotal to white (which is our website background) and hid the discount verbiage that appears in the shopping cart. Now we have a beautiful web form that we can use to register the motorcycles!
Check out the web form here. And feel free to play around with it! Enter a number in the quantity box (2-6) to see the registration questions or enter a number of 7 or more and click register to see our customized error message!
In addition to this web form being totally awesome, our registration list is going to be used in conjunction with a query and export definition to create a merge document so that we can print the display signs for each motorcycle (which lists all the answers to the registration questions) in one big batch rather than manually creating 400+ as we had to do last year.
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ARCHIVED | Blackbaud Altru® Tips and Tricks
03/03/2015 6:00am EST
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