Would You Like One Lump or Two?

Developing a Large-Scale Event Registration System for Parkside Church's Women's Tea Event

Getting tickets to your favorite event can require standing in line at odd hours just to make sure you get your coveted spot. For the women of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and its surrounding areas, it’s all about having a seat at the same table with your friends for the annual Women’s Spring Tea.

For the staff at Parkside Church, who host the event, it can be a logistical challenge to handle the multiple phone calls and requests on registration day. Historically, tickets sell out very quickly for this friendly tea.

To reduce the strain on the staff and provide a better experience to those registering, last year Parkside Church decided to offer online registration. Pastor of Communications and Connections Matt McAlvey and Communications Manager Jenn Nenadov turned to Five Q to come up with an online solution for tea registration.

The Ticketmaster of Tea

By moving the registration process online, Parkside Church was hoping to:

Provide a secure method for registration and credit card payment
Allow women to select who they wanted to sit with at the event, and give them the option to be the “hostess” for a given table
Set limits on the number of tickets to be purchased in a single transaction
Develop an online “waiting list” once registration closes

From a technical standpoint, the online registration system would need to:

Handle a large volume of website traffic hitting the same page at once
Track the number of tickets sold, tickets being processed, and tickets still available
“Lock” the tickets a user was purchasing once they started the submission process
“Release” any tickets if a user wants to change the number being purchased
Set a “session” time: this is the time allowable for a user to fill out the form before the system “times out” or forces the user to start the registration process over.
This would be particularly valuable for users that start to fill in their registration and then need to step away from their computer and return later to complete their registration.
Send email confirmations of their completed registration
Provide tracking and reporting for website administrators to see all of the registrants and their information

So the production plan was two-fold: to build an event registration system with the specifications previously outlined into the current website system, and then to conduct significant “load testing” to make sure the website could handle the large volume of traffic expected on registration morning. Both parts were thoroughly tested by the Parkside Church and Five Q staffs across multiple website browsers and computer operating systems, as well as using simulators to mimic hundreds of people accessing the website at once to make sure the website server could handle the load.

Legacy of Love

At 10am EST on registration morning, the Parkside Church and Five Q staffs watched as over 130 people visited the event registration page and bought over 160 tickets in a first two hours. Overall, website sales totaled over $4,000 for the online tickets and the event sold out in a matter of days. The Parkside Church staff were very pleased to be able to easily track all of the online registrations and organize the table seatings directly from the collected information from the website. For the Five Q team, it was exciting to see all of our hardwork pay off and to ensure that the women’s tea continued to be a successful event.