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Registration is the area of the convention that deals with the members of the con, in particular in signing them up and in providing the various member services once they have joined.

Often Registration is a part of Membership Services.

Registration can be considered to be two parts, At-Con Registration Desk, and everything else.

At-Con Registration Desk

• Hand out badges and membership packs to people who have pre-registered.
• Take money from on the door/at-con memberships and provide badge, membership pack etc. to new members
• ABSOLUTELY VITAL (this goes wrong far more often than you'd expect), make sure that the money taken at-con is cross-checked against the memberships taken and that everything agrees. Give the money to your Treasurer with a copy of what it is paying for, and then make sure that all those memberships are added to the membership database. Far too often everyone is wiped out at the end of the con and paperwork goes missing or ends up incomplete and this always leads to questions and problems and "did we charge this credit card?" type questions and "why is the cash box £35 short?".

Everything Else

Pre-Con

• take memberships at other conventions
• receive postal memberships
• process internet memberships
• send out PRs and pre-con newsletters to members (postal or electronic publications)
• handle enquiries about "am I a member?", "can I upgrade?", membership transfers, hotel bookings etc.
• update financial information to the Treasurer so that the income curve can be maintained and the budget can be updated in line with the actual membership income received
• bank any money received
• issue refunds (if your convention does so, most don't)

Post-Con

• update membership database with memberships taken at-con
• update financials with any money received that hasn't been passed to Treasure at the convention
• send out any post-convention publications
• produce an address run for the following year's convention

Computerisation of Registration At-Con

Steve Davies is a computer consultant who has considered the problem, and he says

Here is a piece of good advice. Do not listen to anyone who offers to computerise Registration. There is currently no way of doing this that does not involve either (1) unacceptably large amounts of money or (2) unacceptably lengthy delays at the Registration desk, or (more likely) both.

I have seen it done well precisely once, at Chicon 2000. Doing registration manually is usually simple, cheap and one can throw additional untrained people at it with some expectation of improving the throughput. As soon as you try and automate the process, you lose all this. Do not be misled by professional events which use computerised registration. These usually have spent a lot of money on the problem, have trained staff on Registration who use the system every working day of the year and the whole process is much simplified. Even then, it often takes longer to register someone than is possible with a manual system. Don't do it.

Of course there are people every year that think they can do it better, and one day they will be right, but as of 2008 it still breaks, causes delays and you *must* have a paper backup system for when the network fails, the Wi-Fi hiccups or your hard disk crashes. It's still faster to write it down on paper and enter it in later when the desk is quieter or after the con.