Maria Doria, Coordinator at SCA Medical Missions, is using Regpack to manage their non-profit medical mission trips to Honduras throughout the year. They were using Google to manage their registration in the past, but it just wasn’t cutting it.
Regpack has offered, at an affordable price, a whole suite of admin tools that has automated and streamlined much of the administration process for Maria and her team.
From triggered emails to keep participants up to date on the progress of their application and preparing for their departure, to document uploading and electronic signatures that cut out a lot of manual labor for Maria, Regpack fits the bill for this amazing non-profit!
A big thank you to Maria and the medical professionals who attend these missions! At Regpack, it’s always amazing to be a small part of the great work people are doing around the world! Read on to learn more about how Maria uses Regpack to make her trip registration easier!
Tell me a little bit about your medical mission trips and your role at SCA.
Maria Doria
We are SCA Medical Missions which is a non-profit that was started by Surgical Care Affiliates in 2015. Our mission is to ignite the spirit of service and transform lives by providing access to high quality surgical care globally. One of the ways that we work towards that mission is through Medical Missions Brigades. The brigade participates in a week long program to the Holy Family Surgery Center in Honduras. Currently this is our only site.
We are of course looking towards the future and expanding to other surgery centers. One of the things that makes us unique is that we provide surgical care. I know a lot of other international health organizations focus on primary care or vaccinations, but we’re specifically focused on surgical care.
We provide about 60 surgeries in one week and 100-300 consults as well. We are providing surgeries and specialties that may not be available at lal in the country or are just inaccessible to people because of the cost of those services typically. So we’re able to make those kinds of surgeries available.
My role is the medical missions coordinator and I oversee our Brigade program. I’m the contact person with Regpack, and as people are applying and preparing to go on the brigade.
What process for trip registration were you using before Regpack?
Originally we were using Google Forms for our application. We have a lot of waivers, medical credentials, passports copies that we require all of our participants to submit to us. So the way that we were doing that before, those would all get submitted to me via email, and I would organize them in Google Drive folders by people’s names and I would keep track on a Google Sheet of who turned in what.
I had hundreds and hundreds of emails coming in and it was just a really clunky process. As we’re considering growing every year and eventually growing to multiple sites, it was just not going to be sustainable to do it that way.
The other concern we had was security. We didn’t think that keeping passport information and things like that in a Google sheet was really a secure way to do that. So, we started looking at using a new system right when I came on board. I used our old system for a while. We started looking at other systems.
There was one we were looking at for a while but we found it was going to be as customizable as we needed it to be to fit registration for medical mission trips. We actually started working on our registration in that system and decided it wasn’t going to work either and that is when we were introduced to Regpack.
What about Regpack sealed the deal?
One of the biggest things was the document upload feature because rather than people having to send documents to me by email, it just makes it a lot more efficient because users are able to submit those documents themselves.
The other thing was definitely price. Regpack seems to be one of the more affordable systems out there considering how robust it is. And the third is the degree to which it can be customized.
I think a lot of other registration softwares might be customized for something like a camp but that didn’t fit our model. We were able to change the text, buttons, and we could name products whatever we wanted to. So we were able to customize it to fit our purposes.
You have multiple steps to your process. How has Regpack been in terms of setting up your unique process?
We worked with our initial account manager who helped us get the foundation and all the additional customization and updates we found we need to make along the way have been done by myself and one of our volunteers.
On my end I found it really easy to be able to customize, it’s very user friendly on my end. This is not something I had experience with before, so it’s been easy to use. We’ve been able to adapt it to our process.
People are able to submit their application, I can look over it and make sure the person applying as a surgeon is really a surgeon and can approve that easily. After I approve that, then they have access to all the waivers they need to sign, documents they need to upload.
That’s another thing I would say, the e-Sign feature is very convenient. We had people in the past who would physically print out the papers, sign them, and then they would need to scan and email it to me. It’s been so much easier for people to sign that with a click of a button.
We have open applications, we don’t have a certain registration period, so we’ve been able to manage these hundreds of applications each year through the system at once.
Your application process details many emails going out at specific times before your trip dates. How has using Regpack helped manage this process?
I think one of my favorite things about Regpack are the triggered emails. As soon as somebody submits an application, they get an automatic email that their application has been received and the response period that they should expect.
And then as soon as I can go in and change the status of the application to approve, it triggers another email letting them know they were approved. I really appreciate the facility of the triggered email.
What reports do you use and how have they been helpful?
Of course during the trip we want to make sure that we have paper copies of all the important information. That includes emergency contacts and medical information. So we are able to print those reports and carry them with us during the trips. We also use them to download a report of passport information that we then use to purchase travel insurance on behalf of our participants.
Creating a report of everyone’s flight information is also helpful. We have a record of when everyone is arriving and departing. We also use the information about all of our attendees and payments they make for the brigade to then import into our donor management system. I can more or less connect those systems and have all of that data there as well.
How has the way your charge and manage payments changed since switching to Regpack?
We previously collected payments through the online donation form on our website and by check. I would then mark in the Google Sheet we used for tracking that the payment was received. Now, participants can submit their payments, their waivers, and their documents all in one system. I don’t have to do anything to confirm or track their payments.
Participants can see in their own account whether or not they still have a balance. I can quickly use a filter or pull a report to see which participants on a specific brigade still owe their program fee.
Would you recommend Regpack to another organization like yours, and if so, why? What features were are most important to make your trip registration easy?
The features you get with Regpack compared to the cost of using the system is definitely a big benefit. Also, the ease of setting it up and being able to manage it on the organization end. It’s also pretty user friendly for our participants as well. The degree to which you are able to customize the system was a big selling point as well!
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