Questions on registration/contribution clarification

Written by: Jeremy Horton on Jan 17, 2006 1:40 PM EST

Our Recruitment team went through some dry runs last night, signing up and attempting to make registration payments via DFA-Link for our Training in February.

Unfortunately, we came away a bit more than confused, and with the big announcement message preliminarily going out soon, I was commanded to give come back to you all and try to work out some of the bugs, get some more clear idea on how to make this registration/contribution process easier for those who are going to be coming into this sign-up process from completely outside of the DFA world.

WE worked on the HTML yesterday, and the page itself is looking fine. The Host editing functions are great.

These are some of the concerns (readers digest version):

1. After registration/sign up (for first time users), it get confusing in terms of online payment. From what I gather, "contributions" are really the registration payments, but that isn't made too clear during the process, or when you land on the contribution page itself (biggest complaint: no marked buttons to the actual registration amounts of $60 (standard) and $25 (student). It appears that the contribution page is serving double duty? With the imbed source tying that particular contribution page to our actual DFA-link event ID?

Q: Can something be done to make the contribution page more clear that it is, in fact, the way to you make an online payment for the Training? Something that gives it come consistency (even if it's just modified to include the DFA Training Academy logo and some clarifying text. Also, can there be corresponding dollar amount buttons??


2. For those people who were confused and, in a panic, "bailed-out" of the contribution page before paying (though they HAD registered with DFA-Link in the previous screen), it was confusing on both ends. a) In the HOSTS area, they showed up as "Not Attending" and it's not clear what Hosts do at that point to remind them to confirm and pay, other than to email them through DFA-Link. b) On the user end, the DFA-Link Registration Confirmation took them to a confirmation screen, but did not give them any indication about how to make an online payment for registration tuition.

Q: If the registration-then-contribution page issues addressed above are still unclear and people bail out before paying, what is the process they use to come back to pay, and can the instructions be made more clear (both in their confirmation email and on the page in DFA-Link where the confirmation email sends them?) This is important, I think, because almost everyone who tried wound up bailing out of the contribution screen.

Q: For those who do make it through and pay online at the time they register, can there be a something after clicking the Process Contribution that says to the effect of "Thank you for registering and paying your tuition, blah blah blah." We got confusion from some who paid but got the standard boilerplate of "Thank you for your contribution to DFA" without any mention that this was tied to the training.

I hope my questions are somewhat clear. I know that not all can be answered, of course, but our concern is really on making this process more easy for non-DFA people. We may only get one shot to keep them on board (and not just give up, or not show up, because they didn't feel as if they "completed" the process.)

Thanks, and this is great.

Jeremy
Change for Kentucky

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