Simple vs Single Sign On

As part of Register Now’s ongoing commitment to improving our platform, we are happy to announce a significant and exciting change coming to the platform in the coming weeks! We have been busy over this shut down period with some major overhauls to the registration platform and this is the first of a series of updates going live over the next 8 weeks.

We’re calling this release SSO.

Before we get into the detail of this, it’s worth taking a quick Register Now history lesson. About 5-6 years ago Register Now trialled a username and password account approach for participants. We also trialled an email address and password account approach to see if that had a better result. It didn’t and don’t get us started on this one!*

During the trial period we found that over 80% of users were resetting their passwords every time they registered for an event, regardless of whether they had a user account set up previously or not!

The feedback from this was so overwhelming that we decided that Register Now would never require participants to set a password or to create an account - it just doesn’t make sense to have an impediment that takes them away from the registration process.

In IT terms SSO stands for ‘Single Sign On’ and typically involves the ability to access multiple websites and applications through one single login step. Single Sign On also removes the need (and risk) of having to save user credentials for each site visited into their private database - in short we can use their trusted credentials from a third party (like Facebook or Google) to allow them to log in. This isn’t new and you’ve probably all seen this before on other platforms.

In the event registration space, Single Sign On still presents the same issues that we experienced with the password reset. Participants not remembering which Single Sign On login type they registered with last time. That is, if they were willing to use that same method again (we’ll talk about the reluctance of people to create yet another online account later) - or even which account they used for an event that they may have registered for months earlier!

You can imagine the frustration in the heightened emotions of event week if one of your participants is trying to access their registration, let’s say to change their event distance, with their Facebook account when they actually registered with their Google account. . . Which is actually linked to a previous workplace where they no longer work. And they are trying to do this at 8pm at night when you are not (or don’t want to be) answering enquiries and you have set a 9pm deadline for all changes to be complete! SIGH!

We therefore decided on a more simplified process that we’re calling Simple Sign On. For participants we’ve created a simplified version of SSO that allows participants to use either a third party website, an email address or a mobile number to log into their profile on Register Now. In addition we continue to and will always maintain guest registrations for those that do not wish to ‘create an account’.

Regardless of the method they use to create their registration (including guest registrations), they can always access their original registration simply using their email address or mobile number with a time sensitive code being sent to their chosen option.

Once they have completed an initial registration using either a third party tool, email code or sms code, and in doing so verifying their ownership of that account, we can now pre-load their personal information in future during the registration process removing the largest friction point of all event registrations being the collection of the significant amount of personal information required by event organisers in order to safely conduct their event.

This new process coupled with our proprietary user matching algorithm now also allows us to catch duplicate registrations before they happen! With some events now opening the day after for the next year’s event you’d be amazed how many people end up entering the same event twice!

And the best part about it - all of this is possible without the requirement for a new username or password - no more lost or resetting passwords required!

*But if you are interested you can google the term “AMPSEA” or in long form ‘allow multiple prospects with the same email address’ and see the pain CRM’s and their users are now going through to try to address this problem!