20a - How to set up and manage a registration page on your event

This article explains how to use the "legacy" public registration, that will be deprecated starting January 1, 2023. We recommend that you use the new Registration module.

While preparing your event, you may already know who will be attending, in which case you would simply add their details to Backstage and then send out event invitations. However, for cases where you don't know who may be attending, who may be interested, or if you simply want to open your event to as wide an audience as possible, you should set up a registration page.

With a registration page, you can collect user contact information and generate interest prior to providing access to the workspace. You can even have multiple registration pages linked to a workspace, in order to collect different types of information from users when they sign-up.

Important: To create a registration page or customize its branding and fields, you will need to install the Public log-in module. Please reach out to SpotMe support to do this, our team will install it on your workspace and create the registration page for you.

Tip: To help you decide whether a registration page is the right option for your event, take a look at the Attendee journey article. You may also wish to read the Public registration process article to see the full registration process.

In this article we'll show you how the registration page can look, how to configure it, as well as the emails that are sent to participants.

How does a registration page look and work

Welcome page	Sign up page
1. Logo (684 × 684px transparent PNG) 2. Welcome text 3. Introduction text 4. Sign up button text and color	5. Page title 6. Page introduction 7. Unlimited number of free-text or dropdown-style questions 8. Privacy policies

The registration page is accessible to participants by following an install.events/<event name> link. When opened on iOS and Android devices, it can either redirect users to download an associated mobile app or proceed with the web app.

The registration process has three steps:

1. The welcome page which can be used to introduce the event to the participant.
2. The sign-up screen to collect participants data (or a login page if they have already signed up).
3. A confirmation screen or direct access to the web app depending the access settings.

Examples of fields the registration page can contain

The registration page is a great way to collect information on your event participants before they join your event. A registration page typically contains a number of fields for participants to fill in with their information.

These fields can be made mandatory or optional. You can choose different types of fields for users to fill in:

• Open text
• A password
• An email address
• A number
• An list of options from a dropdown
• A country (chosen from a dropdown).

Below are some basic examples of the questions or fields you can add to the registration page:

• First name
• Last name
• Email address
• Country
• Telephone number

How to configure the registration page access restrictions

The registration process that participants will follow when signing up to your event will depend on how the registration page is configured.

You can choose to add participants to your event audience directly after they sign up, or add a manual approval step, or an email verification step.

The registration page access restrictions can be configured from your workspace > Content > Users > Preferences > Public login.

Here you can select how you would like to approve/verify registrations:

Manually approve each user

With this option enabled, you will need to approve each participant that signs up on the registration page before they get access to the workspace. When enabled, the below options are not applicable.

To approve registered participants, please see below the Seeing and approving participant registrations section.

Email verification

By default, after entering their email address in the registration page, users will receive a confirmation email containing a link for them to click on. After confirming their email, the user is then redirected to the workspace.

If you disable the email verification option, users will have direct access to the workspace, however:

• Their email address will be stored in a provided_email field on their profile, instead of in the usual email field.
• After logging out, they won't be able to access their profile again (including their notes or messages).

Therefore, if you are sending out emails from Backstage, make sure to update your templates to use {{provided_email}} instead of {{email}} in the To: field.

Note: If you wish to customize the confirmation email, make sure that you edit the available templates below, instead of creating a new email. If you try to use a new email other than the template ones this will not work.

Allowed email domains

This option is used to allow only users with specific email addresses to access the workspace. Users with a non-whitelisted email address will be rejected at the registration page step.

Access code

As an extra security precaution, you can set up a shared access code for the workspace. Users will be asked to enter this code on the registration page in order to complete the registration.

The access code is the same for all users, and can be easily shared. If your workspace needs to be accessible only to certain users, you may not want to use the registration page at all and instead simply import your audience into Backstage.

Email templates

During the registration process, Backstage sends out different emails depending on your settings.

• There is an Email address confirmation template, used to ask the participant to verify their email, when email verification is configured.
• There is a Sign-up confirmation template, used to confirm to the participant that they have successfully signed-up.

Both templates contain variables, or links, that will take the user to the next step of the process, based on how the registration process is configured.

These emails can be selected as part of configuring the registration page, as explained above.

These email templates can also be customized from your workspace > Design > Emails.

Template	Sent when	Special variables
Email address confirmation	User submits registration form and email verification is enabled. Template is used to request that user confirms email address. User receives sign-up confirmation email once email is confirmed.	{{_webapp_link}} URL to access the workspace.
Sign-up confirmation email	User submits registration form, email verification is completed (if configured). User is added to workspace and can now access it.	{{_webapp_link}} URL to access the workspace.

 

Seeing and approving participant registrations

The registration status for all participants that have signed up to an event via a public registration page is visible in the workspace, via the Users module.

To see this information in Backstage, go to Content > Users. Here you will see three tabs at the top of the screen, called Users, Self-registered users and Pending registration requests:

Users: This is a list of all the participants added to the event, whatever their status: (including the Self-registered users) mentioned below

Self-registered users: Here will appear all participants who have signed-up via the registration page (i.e. have been approved and or confirmed their email address).

Pending registration requests: Here will appear the participants who have registered but not yet confirmed their email address via the email confirmation that was sent to them. This also applies when the option to manually approve participants is enabled: the participants will also appear in this list until they have confirmed their email address.

To manually approve (or deny) any pending registration requests, you will need to click on the participants listed in the Pending registration requests tab, and hit Approve or Deny:

Clicking on Approve for a pending registration request will send the associated Sign-up confirmation email to the participant, and give them access to the event.

Approved participants will no longer be listed in the Pending registration requests tab, and instead will be listed in the Users and Self registered users tabs, as explained above.