Northern Movement, a client of Regpack since 2014 is using the system to manage registration and payments for their annual convention. Directors, Nikki Loiero and Marilynn Garcea took a few minutes to chat with us about why they love the system, and how they are using it to make registration a breeze, check-in easy, and how they keep their data organized! Thank you to Nikki and Marilynn!
Nikki and Marilynn have been involved in dance – dancing competitively, professionally and choreographing for the past 20 years. They are exceptionally passionate about teaching acrobatics and are motivated to share this passion with upcoming generations. Together, they developed their company Northern Movement and started touring Ontario with The ACRO Convention in 2014. The ACRO Convention unites the industry’s top acrobatic instructors under one roof for a weekend of specialized training.
Tell me a little bit about Northern Movement.
Marilynn Garcea
Marilynn: Northern Movement is a company that Nikki and I started. We grew up dancing together and we both are really passionate about ACRO, a form of dance. We started a convention that focuses only on acrobatic dance. We tour from city to city in Ontario, and we hire industry leading acrobatic instructors to tour with us.
Nikki: We market our event to dance studios in the cities our tour visits. The ACRO Convention is open to dancers ages 5-18. Participants train with acrobatic instructors that they wouldn’t normally get the opportunity to train with at their home studio.
Nikki Loiero
Usually at a dance studio, there is 1 ACRO teacher, but when they come to our convention, they have the opportunity to train with 8 different ACRO teachers in one weekend. It ends up being 12 hours of training and feedback in 1 weekend vs. your typical 2 hours per week in your dance studio. So they get a whole bunch of training all at once and for a lot of kids it helps them learn the skills a lot faster.
How did you get started using Regpack?
Marilynn: Nikki and I incorporated our company in February 2014 and that was our first season. We started with Regpack right away. We spoke with a few different registration software companies and Regpack fit what we needed the best. We felt the most comfortable with using Regpack.
Nikki: In the beginning we honestly didn’t know what the capability of Regpack was. We were just looking for a software that could be used online, that we could have a portal from our website that people could easily find and register. The more we talked to the team at Regpack about what we could do with the software the more we realized the information gathering would be easy and organized, that we could export everything into an excel file, generate customizable reports, and it was so user-friendly and easy to navigate.
Marilynn: Cost wise it was also the most reasonable. You pay a monthly fee to store your clients, and that’s it. And then, the commission on payments is reasonable and what everyone else charges. Monthly fees for other packages we looked at were way more expensive, so Regpack stood out.
Your registration process includes waivers and gathering medical details. How has Regpack served for you in obtaining this sensitive information?
Marilynn: It’s great for that because Nikki and I did a mix of Regpack and paper registration the first year. If people wanted to register in person they could fill it out and sign. It was so tedious and time consuming. Not just having people fill out the waivers and forms when they arrive at the event on the spot, but then storing all of those waivers and keeping them organized was a lot.
Nikki: When we have an event with 150 per weekend and we have 5 of those weekends per year, to store 750 paper waivers is so unreasonable. Especially because we tour, our office space is just to stay organized and run the event, it isn’t somewhere where people come and train and we have endless filing cabinets to put all of these waivers in. So Regpack has been really great for that.
You offer many programs, as well as discount codes and scholarships. Have you found managing the admin of all of these moving parts easy with Regpack?
Nikki: It’s been really good! I feel like Regpack has grown with us. It has all these features from the beginning, but every feature we’ve asked to add or is Regpack capable of doing this, every need we’ve had Regpack has given us a way to do that. Every thing we’ve come across, the system has been capable of.
As things have come up and there has been a need for something, Regpack is always updating itself and making the system better!
What reports do you use most, and how has the ability to filter and find information you need been for you?
Marilynn: We use the reports a lot! Our event, because we take kids from 5-18 and we take all levels (beginner-advanced). When we host our event, we need to split the kids between age and level. So during registration we collect all that information and we can customize the reports and export them into an excel and group them based on age and level.
So Group 1 is ages 5-9 and beginners, Group 2 is 6-11 and level 2. And so on.
Nikki: It’s been really great for us to be able to divide our participants according to age and level based on all those reporting functions Regpack offers.
Would you recommend Regpack to friends or professionals? If so, why?
Nikki: Absolutely we would, 100%! When people arrive at the convention, it’s so easy to know if they’ve paid or not. We just sit at the registration desk with our computers, ask the last name, type it into the search field and right away we can see if they’ve paid and make sure they are in the right level, get the right papers, and sent to the right spot.
So without even generating a report and pulling it into an excel, even the quick look of what you see when you type in a person’s name, is great. You see so much information: what they’ve paid, what they’ve registered for. It makes check-in a lot less stressful. You don’t even need to print a list and keep it with you, it’s all right there.
Marilynn: Nikki and I both have full time jobs that we do separate from Northern Movement, we do it because we’re so passionate about it. It’s this extra thing we do. So for me to be in one place and Nikki to be somewhere else and she can call and say “Can you check who registered”, and we both have access to it at anytime, is amazing! Rather than it be a program that is on my laptop and we have to be together to look at it. We can get our data on our phone, our laptops, anything. I would absolutely recommend Regpack!