Camp Management Software

   

Mouse-Over Help

You may notice one or more small question marks on many of our pages. These are mouse-over help buttons. They display context related help. To allow them to work be sure you have disabled popup blocking for CongregationBuilder.com.

   

Getting Started

We make it easy for you to let your members and visitors register for your events at your website. Our software will let you define an online event registration form for each of your events. We will give you a link that you can put on your website that will allow people to use your registration forms and then pay using PayPal.

   

To define a new online event, use the “Make a New Form” link which is found in the left-nav bar. It will let you define values such as the event name, the date on which a person could first sign up for the event, the last date to sign up, etc. It also lets you define the comments and questions that will comprise the online registration form. The “Make a New Form” has a help page link on it as well as mouse-over pop-up help.

   

To get the event registration link for your website you can click on the link found in our left-nav bar with the title “Do Event Signup (for your public page)” and copy the URL.

   

   

Pay-To-Attend Events

When you set up an event you may define it to be a free event or one which participants will be charged to attend.

   

Our software will allow you to define the cost rules of each of your events separately.  One of your events may be priced on way and another event priced in a different way. Bottom line, our software lets you define pricing your way.

   

One choice is “simple pricing” whereby each attendee is charge a fixed price. Our advanced pricing choice calculates the price based on choices made by a person on the online registration form.

   

As an example you could have a drop-down list that has a price for an adult and lesser prices for children of different ages, and a different price for” counselor in training” etc. Moreover, you could define various check boxes that would add to or subtract from the price (Examples: camp T-shirt, multiple child discount, etc.)

   

We will help when you are getting started J

   

Displaying Cost to the Registrant

If an event has an associated cost, registrants will be able to see the basic price and extras that make up the total.

   

Partial Payments and Deposits

When you define a registration form you can choose to allow partial payments and deposits rather than full payment.

   

Method of Payment

When an event requires payment you can define whether the registrant will have a choice to pay by check or by PayPal or both.

   

PayPal Integration and Two Way Communication

Our Server has a two way communication with PayPal. All secure operations are done at PayPal and our server never sees or stores credit card numbers or PayPal user names or passwords, but PayPal contacts our server to tell it when a transaction was completed and was successful or not successful. Your staff does not need to use the emails sent by PayPal and manually update the database with dates and amounts of PayPal transactions. This is done automatically due to the two way communications with our server and the PayPal server.

   

Testing the Registration Form

After you have finished defining the registration form you can test it by using the link with the title “Do Event Sign Up (for admin use)”. In that way you will be able to see what the form will look like to online registrants and use it to do a few test registrations.   

You will be able to view the results of your test registrations on the page titled “Attendee Lists”

On each row of this page is a delete button at the far right to let you delete your test registrations. In general you should not use this delete button to cancel a real registration. See the paragraph below titled “Canceling a Signup”.

 

Editing the Registration Form

After using your new form you may realize that you need to edit your registration form, that is fix a typo in one of the registration questions or add a registration question. To do this use the link titled “List of Forms”.  It displays a list of the registration forms you have created.  Choose the event you wish to edit by clicking the “Select” button next to an event name.

   

 Once people have used the form to register for an event you can edit the basic form and typos, but do not add or delete questions.  Call for technical support if you need to do this.

   

Registering For an Event

CB allows members or visitors to go to your Church website and register for one of your events. A person can identify themselves by their email address if they are a “returning user” or enter their basic information if they are a new user.

   

At your website you have two choices. You can have a paragraph or two describing each of your events and for each event a separate link that starts them on the process of registering for that event. Contact CB support for information on how to make these links.  Or alternatively you can have one link that points them to a page where they select the event from a drop-down of all of your church’s events that require registration. You will find this link in our left-nav bar titled “Do Event Sign Up (for your public page)”.

 

Viewing the List of Attendees

You can view the list of people who have registered for an event by using the “Attendee List” link. Select the event you wish to view by selecting the event name in the drop-down list. Past events do not show up in the drop-down list until you check the box labeled “Include past events”. 

 

The Attendees list displays one row per household that registered for an event.  At the bottom of the Attendees list there is a count of the number of people attending and the count of people on the waiting list. 

   

Sorting Our Grids

Many of the grids displayed on our pages allow you to click in the header of a column to cause the grid to sort the table on that data in that column. When you first display an Attendee List it is sorted in order of the signup date. If you wanted to order the list alphabetically by household name click the word “household” in the header of the household-name column.

   

If you click a second time on a column header the grid will sort in reverse order. For instance, if you clicked twice on the household name it would sort from Z at the top to A at the bottom. If you click the header of a date field it would sort in ascending date order and if you click twice it would sort in descending date order.

 

Canceling a Signup

 If a member asks you to cancel them from am event you have two choices. You can use the delete button on the Attendee List, but then you will have no record of their sign up or deletion. Or you can use the “Waiting List Page” (described below) where you can change their status to “Canceled”.  Then the registrants won’t show up in the attendee list or elsewhere, but you will have a record of when they signed up and when they canceled and by whom.

 

Editing an Attendee’s Entries

There are times that a registrant will call and ask you to change an answer they made to their signup or to add or delete a person to their signup. To do this, display the Attendees List for that event and select the “edit” button next to that attendee’s name.  That will cause their signup to display and allow you to edit it.

   

To add a person to their signup use the drop-down list that indicates how many people they are signing up and increase the count by one. The form will then change and allow you to enter information about the additional person.

   

A registrant may not edit their signup information nor can they delete it.  This can only be done by the admin/registrar.

 

The Waiting List Page

When you make a new signup form and define an event, one of the options is whether the event has a maximum allowed attendance and if you want CB to maintain a waiting list for that event. When an event is full those who try to sign up for it will be told that they will be put on a waiting list and told how many people are on the waiting list ahead of them.

 

The waiting list page displays three lists:  the list of those on the waiting list, those on the cancelled list and also the list of those attending. To view a list, first select an event and then use the drop-down titled “Show the list of persons” to select waiting list, attending or canceled.

 

The admin can use these lists to transfer people from one list to another.  For example to move someone from waiting to attending do the following:

1)      Select the Event name.

2)      Select waiting list from the “show the list of persons” drop-down.

3)      Scroll if necessary and click the “Transfer” button for that household name.

4)      Scroll if necessary if that household has been scrolled out of view and change “waiting” to “attending” for that household.

5)      Enter the users name or initials in the “transferred by” field.

6)      Click the “update” button displayed at the left of the row.

Note that the household will no longer display in the waiting list. However if you change to the “show list of persons” drop-down to “attending”, that household name will be there.

 

Canceling a Signup

You can remove a signup from the Attending List and place them on the Cancelled list. This is done using the Waiting List page. Use the instruction shown above, but use the drop-down list to change the registrant from “attending” to “canceled”. Then they will display on the Canceled List.

   

When you cancel a signup all the members of that household that were registered in that signup will be removed from attending and will be canceled. If your intention is to edit a signup and remove some of the household members from attending, but not all, then edit that signup instead of canceling it.

 

   

Details & Totals Page

Select an event on the Details and Totals page and it will display the list attendees sorted by household name. It displays all the answers from the registration form.

   

Some of the answers make sense to total and those totals will be shown at the bottom of the Details and Totals page.

   

If the question is answered by a checking a box the total will be the total number of times the box was checked. If the question is a number the total will be the sum. If the question is answered by selecting from a drop-down list, totals will be displayed as a drop-down list with the choices followed by the number of times each choice was selected.  For example, if people had to choose from a drop-down and the choices were: chicken, fish, steak. The totals drop-down might be chicken/25, fish/35 and steak/28.

   

   

Payments & Invoicing

The Payments & Invoicing Page lets you process your pay-to-attend events.  In the main grid it displays the charges for each household and the payments received. At a glance you can see who is not paid up.

By clicking the “Select” button at the right side of a row a window will open up that will let you do any of the following tasks:

process a payment

add or edit a purchase

add or edit a discount

display an invoice and print it

display an invoice and email it to the household.

 The emailed invoice will have a link to take the customer to PayPal and pay the amount or optionally allow the customer to make a partial payment at PayPal or of course pay by check.

   

Household Activities Page

The household activities page lets you view all the purchases and payments that a household has made for all open and recently closed events. It is useful to find cases where a person has registered for several events, but instead of paying for them individually the person has sent one check to cover multiple events or paid at PayPal for several events at one time. In that case one event will have an overpayment and the other an underpayment, but by viewing them together it would be clear what the intensions of the customer are.

   

Email Reminders

Email reminders allow you to compose a message and send an email to each attendee to an event. You may include those on the waiting list if you desire. You may separately send the email to people that have signed up for past events. It is a great way to inform prospects about an upcoming event.

   

Assign Rooms

This page is used by the registrar to assign campers to rooms. It displays a list of households that have registered for a given camp.  When it is first displayed it is sorted in the order that the campers registered for the camp. The list is divided into pages with seven rows each. At the bottom of that grid is a list of page numbers. You can click on a page number to display that page.

   

By clicking in the header you can sort the list by the data in that column. By clicking “household” it will sort alphabetically by household name. If you click twice it will sort in reverse order by household name (Z to A). 

   

When you click on “cabin” in the header it will sort by the cabin name that was assigned to each household. A helpful effect of sorting by cabin is that households that have not been assigned will sort to the top of the list and will be easy to identify. 

   

To assign room(s) to the members of a household click the “AssignRoom” button. This will open a window with the information needed to assign rooms. You will be able to view the rooms that have vacancies and the information that was entered by the registrant when registering online, such as cabin preference and roommate preferences (assuming that you wanted those questions when you designed the registration form).

As you assign a household to a room you are presented with two choices: to assign all the members of a household to the same room and to do so in one operation, or to assign each member of the household individually. The first method gives you speed and the second gives you flexibility.

   

Who is Coming?

 The “Who is Coming” page displays a list of all the people who are registered for an event. It has one row per person as differentiated from the Attendee list which has one row per household.

This list is sorted by household name and displays the “person” information for each.

   

When the software is used for camp management it displays room assignments. The registrar can see at a glance those who have not been assigned to a room, and the printed form can be used for camper sign-in.

   

The page has a button which displays a printer friendly copy. It also lets you include or exclude columns so the printout will not display information you don’t want or make the page too wide to fit on a printed page.

   

   

Cabin Occupancy

 This page displays the campers, one cabin at a time, and orders the list by room number and displays the “person” information for each occupant.

   

When you want to assign a bunk to a camper it lets you see at a glance who is assigned to a particular room.  The grid displays information about each person so you will know if the room is compatible by gender, age etc. (assuming that those questions were included in the registration form you designed).

   

A second use of this page is to print a listing by cabin of who is assigned to each room. You can include or exclude information that is appropriate when the page will be displayed in a cabin.

   

Monthly Receipts Page

The Monthly Receipts page displays the total receipts for each event by month. It displays the column and row totals. You have the choice to display the receipt amounts including or excluding PayPal charges and you can also display the amount of the charges separately.

   

How to Turn Off Mouse-Over Help

After a while you may want to turn off mouse-over help. To do this, uncheck the box at the very top of the left nav bar that is titled "mouse-over help".