We’re pleased to announce that Expectnation now supports online registration for attendees.

Capabilities of the registration module include:

• Multiple registration packages
• Early-bird, regular and walk in pricing
• Flexible discount codes
• Registration options for managing things such as tutorial signups or activity choices
• Survey system to gather custom marketing or logistical data per attendee
• Online credit card payments
• Sales reporting and data exports
• Press registration
• Optional organizer-approval stage on registrations

For more details, take a look at the registration section in the Expectnation tour, or contact us now by emailing sales@expectnation.com.

Reviewers are users who are signed up to an Expectnation account, and have reviewing privileges. They will see a “Reviewing” tab in the Dashboard view for the event for which they’re a reviewer.

There are two main ways in which you can recruit a team of reviewers in Expectnation. The first of these is using a Reviewer Request, which automates a lot of the process for you, and the second is by manually setting the reviewing properties on a user.

Using Reviewer Requests

Reviewer Requests let you send a customized message to a user, giving them a Yes / No choice of whether to participate in the review. If they respond positively, the request will lead them through creating an Expectnation account if they don’t already have one.

Creating a reviewer request

To create a request, visit Mailroom->Requests and click on the create new reviewer request link. You will see a space for the request subject, which will appear as the subject line in the outgoing email, and three text areas. These allow you to customize the request text, and the message the user sees when they response positively or negatively.

(All of these text fields allow you to use rich text, but bear in mind the first will be converted to plain text when sent in an email.)

Once you’ve created the request, you’ll see it pop up in the request list. Click on its title to see more detail, and a preview of how the outgoing request email will look.

You will see that your request text is inserted in between some standard text which tells the recipients how to make their response via the Expectnation site.

If you’re not happy with the text, use the Edit tab to change it.

Figure 1. Review request overview screen, showing responses.

Sending a reviewer request

To send a request, first select the “Send to a user” tab from the request overview. Then use the search to look for the user in the user database. When you find them, just click on the “Send request” link by their name.

If the user doesn’t exist in the user database yet, which will happen a lot for your first events, then use the “Add new user and send request” form instead.

Sending the request has two results:

• The user gets an email with the request in, giving a link to click on to send you their response

• The request is listed on the “Home” tab of their Expectnation account dashboard, so they can find the request even if they lose the email

If you’ve sent the request via the “Add new user and send request” form, then any user accepting the request will be taken through the Expectnation user account signup process at that point.

Handling replies

When a user responds to a reviewer request, they are taken to a form which displays the same request that went in the email. They can then select either “Yes, I accept” or “No, I decline”. In addition there is a text field presented to them.

• If they accept, they can use this area to indicate which subject areas they are interested in reviewing

• If they decline, they can use this area to send you a note of explanation

You can get a quick snapshot of the progress of the request by viewing the overview tab: you’ll see a pie chart giving a breakdown of responses. The responses can be viewed in detail via the “Accepted”, “Declined” and “No response yet” tabs.

When a user declines a reviewer request

If a user answers “No, I decline”, that is the last action that will happen. You can find any note they added in the “Declined” list.

When a user accepts a reviewer request

If the user answers “Yes, I accept”, then they receive a thankyou note, along with a message telling them they’ll be able to find proposals in their account Dashboard. You’ll be able to see their positive response in the “Accepted” list for the request you sent.

If you click on the user’s name in the accepted list, you’ll be taken to their user overview. In their “Reviewing” tab you’ll see their acceptance note has been copied to the “Expertise area notes”, and you can edit this for your convenience. When allocating reviewers to a proposal, you can search by keywords mentioned in the expertise area notes, as well as reviewer name.

The user has now been activated as a reviewer and can be added as a reviewer for proposals in the normal way, through the “Reviewing” tab of a proposal.

Alternatively if you wish them to see all proposals, or all proposals in a certain topic, you may configure this from the user’s “Reviewing” tab.

Resending requests

Many people need a reminder that you want something from them! To resend a request, visit the “No response yet” tab of a request, and check the “resend” boxes against those people you wish to remind, then click the “Resend checked” button to send the request out.

The recipients will receive the same email again, and the time of sending will be noted in the “No response yet” list, so you know when you last contacted someone.

Manually creating reviewers

If you don’t wish or need to use a reviewer request, e.g. the review team is a small number of people who you’ve already contacted, then it is possible simply to enable them as a reviewer by looking them up in the User list, and visiting their “Reviewing” tab.

On that tab you’ll be able to set them up as a reviewer, and additionally indicate if you wish them to see all proposals or all proposals in a certain topic. When allocating reviewers to a proposal, you can search by keywords mentioned in the expertise area notes, as well as reviewer name, so you might want to put terms in here to make this easier for you.

The only complication is if the user concerned isn’t already in the database. You’ll then need to add them. The easiest way to do this is go to Users->Invite, which lets you send a signup invitation by email to the user. Note that this message won’t explictly say anything about reviewing, just signing up for a new account.

The final step: communicating with reviewers

Once your team is recruited, you’ll probably want to tell them how and when to get started. To do this visit Mailroom->Compose and write a batch email to all Reviewers.

You can also use the Mailroom to remind reviewers who’ve not yet completed assigned reviews.