We recently sat down with Andrew Nakamura, Finance and Properties Coordinator for Foursquare Southwest District at The Foursquare Church. Andrew and The Foursquare Church have been using Regpack for church camp registration for over 3 years for their church groups to register their members for camps and events. Their setup is pretty interesting considering that they aren’t just 1 church, but a hub for as many as 180 churches and managing registration to events from all of their participating churches.
For Andrew, finding a software that could adapt to their special setup wasn’t easy. Since Regpack offers registration for many organization types, the platform ended up being a perfect fit for Foursquare since it was so easily adaptable to the functionality they really needed.
Read on to learn more about The Foursquare Church, why their old system wasn’t cutting it, and what they love most about Regpack. Thanks Andrew for taking the time to chat with us!
Tell me a little bit about you and your role at the Foursquare Church.
Andrew and Britney Nakamura
We’re a district office that services over 180 different churches. Our role is hosting and being the administrators for those camps. I’m not the one who heads the camp, I handle all of the administrative aspects of the camps – registration, check in and things like that.
Your previous online registration system wasn’t offering what you really needed. What features were you looking for when you began your search for another system?
We needed a system that was more reliable and offered more features than the one we were using. One of the biggest things with online systems is reliability and the user experience. With our previous system we were running into a lot of errors which was preventing people from being able to complete their registration. For example, the form would ask for a date and the user would put it in and it would give them an error at the end that they had left a field blank, but it was already completed. We ran into these type of issues pretty frequently.
We wanted to put a lot of the work in the user’s hands, not ours. So when it came to making adjustments to their registration group, our previous platform did not allow our churches and registrants to be able to do that. It put more work on our office because every time something simple needed to be adjusted with our registration, we would have to do it internally instead of our churches and registrants being able to do that. Regpack did offer that ability and that was a huge benefit for us! It freed up a lot of our time which was very important to us.
How did you find Regpack? If you considered other software options, what ultimately sold you on Regpack?
I found Regpack through research online. We considered other solutions, but Regpack offered the features we needed at the right price point.
Were you able to organize groups effectively before using Regpack?
Not to the extent that we can with Regpack.
How has the ability to offer group registration and payment discounts helped your registration process?
It has allowed us to keep the whole registration process online without needing to use paper, which has saved us a lot of time.
When it came to registration, it’s the back end features that Regpack allows us to do that sold us. When it comes to filtering, reports and things like that, there’s a lot more features that allow us to run all the reports we need when it comes to all the groups. That’s a big thing for us because there are so many different groups that register. We needed a platform that allowed us to filter those out easily so we know what groups are together, which aren’t and Regpack allows us to very simply separate those groups. If we want to run specific reports for a church or a group, we can.
How are you using emails with your attendees?
We use this to send reminders as well as important information about the event.
How have you enjoyed Regpack’s reporting tools? What kind of reports are you running?
Yes. This tool has saved us many hours, as we use to have to create these reports manually.
We run mainly general reports. What we like about the reporting system, is it allows you to pull as much information as you want, and as little as you want. It suits whatever need you have for that specific report. You can include every question you asked in your registration, or you can just request the name of the people, the camp they registered for and their group name. It’s one of the things we really like about the reporting feature.
How has Regpack saved you time?
It’s hard to quantify but Regpack really helps in that registration is a side thing I do, it’s not my main role to handle camps. Having Regpack in place allows me to focus on my day to day job more instead of the administration of the camps. This is great because really, when you invest into a system, you want it to be able to do as much of the work as possible.
“Regpack allows us to invest more time into the event vs. investing time into the administration of the event. It allows us to make our event stronger because we are able to put more time into it.’
We were spending more time and money on the admin end, making internal changes and bringing in an intern or hiring a part time person to help with administration of the event. Now, the system does 90% of the work for us, so it’s saving time and money.
What is your favorite feature of the Regpack church camp registration software?
The ability for our users to login in and make adjustments to their registrations. This feature saves us a lot of time!
Anything else you want to add about your experience with Regpack?
The biggest thing for us, is the fact that we’re unique. We’re not just a church that has 1 group of people. We’re working with a 180 different churches, so most platforms aren’t developed to be able to cater to our needs.
“Regpack is unique in that it caters to what we need.”
That was the biggest thing we’ve been happy with with Regpack.
Thanks again to Andrew! If you want to learn more about Regpack’s online church camp registration software, request a free demo today with one of our account managers and learn how our system can fit your exact needs!