Setting Up Your Seasonal Registration For Success

0:30 Review your registration setup

3:45 Creating your registration(s)

3:57 Separate registrations by age/location/practice time

7:00 Why you should offer installment plans

11:00 Replicating a registration

12:17 How roster and messaging group automations work

13:24 Creating an ‘All wrestlers’ messaging group for the season.

15:30 Creating the schedule and linking events to rosters and registrations

17:30 Using a Google Maps link on your calendar events

20:00 Demo of registering a wrestler as a parent

24:30 Q&A

• The Mat Club’s Public Calendar.
• Slides.
• Helpful post on creating an accessible schedule for your team

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the first WrestlingIQ webinar ever. I'm excited to actually talk about best practices today for seasonal registrations for wrestling teams. This is a typical freestyle or folkstyle season that you're opening up once or twice a year.

[00:00:16] But if you're a membership model team, you are going to have some little tips in here for you as well

[00:00:25] And yeah, feel free to drop questions in the chat as we get into it and we'll make sure to get to that at the end. So first step is just reviewing your setup. I'm gonna walk us through here, but this is, basically what you did at the very beginning. So one of the things I like to reference a lot, even as someone who uses this, is this help walkthrough section.

[00:00:52] Because it puts all the links in a specific place for you just to give a quick review, because your questions might change a little bit or maybe you need to tweak them. [00:01:00] If you haven't been in this page before, it got a little bit better recently where it's gonna give you a little preview over here of your questions.

[00:01:08] In my case, I just have some basic information for the each wrestler, emergency contact gear, sizes, and allergies. And you wanna review the same thing for parents as well. Just a quick look. Generally I don't recommend having too much information here. You need as much as you think you'll need to run the season, but you want to balance.

[00:01:30] Making sure your registration is streamlined with collecting the information you need. So don't be afraid to cut it back a little bit. It's usually better to good question, Jeff. Too much information is, it makes it harder to sign up. You also have data requirements depending on your state if you're handling sensitive information.

[00:01:50] And sometimes it's better just to not to ask that information instead of storing it. You know, things like, obviously you do not want to ask for things like a social security number here. Don't do [00:02:00] that. But really the reason is just to make it easier for people to sign up, get people in the door, get the bare minimum information you need for liability purposes in running your season.

[00:02:09] So we did that liability forms. So under documents, there's a section up here, liability forms. This one's an example. Liability form is what you want. USA Wrestling has a copy you can use if you use that club type of club or from your lawyer. Liability forms are different from documents requiring a signature.

[00:02:30] So these ones are signed once per user, so if a parent signs up, they'll sign it once. If a wrestler signs up, they'll also sign it in their own name. Liability forms are different in that they're assigned per wrestler. So if you've got a parent with multiple kids, they're gonna sign a liability form with their name and the name of the kid each time. So if they got two kids, they're signing that twice so that it's explicit per kid. That's why we use liability forms in that [00:03:00] case.

[00:03:04] And finally, USA Wrestling configuration. So I. Particularly for the freestyle season, I know you might need USA wrestling cards if you're an AAU club or something else, it doesn't apply to you, but just take a peek over there, make sure you set it up if you need it for parents to purchase. If you're doing bulk buys for USA wrestling make sure you set it to invisible and there's some help documentation you can reference to do a bulk buy, but generally this is the one you want if your parents are buying cards for you.

[00:03:37] All right moving on. So that's just a quick review of the basic setup. You should have that done. You really shouldn't need to do much with that each year. Now we're actually gonna get into the fun stuff, which is creating an actual seasonal registration. So pop over here to payments registrations.

[00:03:57] And I'm gonna go ahead and create one from scratch [00:04:00] so you can see. Couple tips and tricks here. I like to put in brackets here to make the team registration page, which is gonna look like this more alphabetical. So by adding a bracket, you control ordering a little bit on that page. So in my case for my club, there's a few things that I'm gonna think about here.

[00:04:25] One is practice schedule. When you set up your registrations, you're gonna want to create a registration for each group that your team is registering. So if you have, say, a four to nine year old group, that's one time, and you have a nine to 13 year old group at another time, you should create distinct registrations for them so that the automations downstream work better for you.

[00:04:51] And that's what we're gonna do in this demo, but that might also apply if you have multiple locations. Or you have multiple locations plus different age [00:05:00] groups. So for example, you know, you might type your location

[00:05:10] four to seven,

[00:05:17] something like that. Since I'm only gonna do one location. Or pretend like my club has on location. I'm only gonna do this, I'm gonna do ages four to seven 2023 freestyle. I'm gonna select full season here because I want parents to be forced to create an account so they have access to the team calendar and messaging.

[00:05:38] Once they register for returning people, they already have an account. They're gonna breeze through that registration process cause it's gonna be prefilled anyways.

[00:05:46] Different options for sessions. So full season is what you typically want for your full. I need to communicate with your team. They're on the roster. They're going to tournaments with me all the time. Session camps is [00:06:00] sort of a guest checkout experience if you're not on the team, so you won't be forced to create a password, but you'll still be forced to fill out all the information this is intended for. You know, we've got a clinic, a clinician coming in and like people from our region are going to be here, but they're not necessarily on the team, so I want them to be distinct for that and not have to jump through as many hoops to register.

[00:06:24] Drop-ins are if you're wrestling club, typically this is common for membership based clubs. So if you're running a monthly subscription or a bi-weekly subscription, you'll also have a drop in pack. So this will let you create class passes essentially. And other is sort of a grab egg. Maybe you're doing a potluck, maybe you're collecting money for a tournament.

[00:06:45] That one's a little different for that purpose. But we're gonna go full season and we're gonna do full two full seasons. I'm gonna new kids, I'm gonna do a start date of, let's do March one, just for [00:07:00] example, purposes. And we'll go to the end of May. Two things of payment options. I highly recommend that you use installment plans in addition to upfront options.

[00:07:11] Couple reasons. One is that installment plans where you're, for example, setting it up. So parents pay once a month for the three months here in season are a lot easier on a family's budget. It's not an upfront thing. They can budget for it throughout the season. Much cleaner from that perspective. The lower upfront cost also lets parents basically trial it for a month to make sure their kid's gonna like it without needing to commit for 500 bucks.

[00:07:40] That can be a lot easier for helping you get kids in the door and retain them over time. And finally, you know, there's a proliferation of buy now, pay later things these days from affirm, from your credit card, from whatever. And it's just sort of an expectation. So installments definitely recommend it. I think it's gonna help you in your [00:08:00] club and wrestlingIQ will automatically collect that money for you, so it's not any extra work on your end.

[00:08:06] So I'm gonna start with installments to give you an example there. With installments, highly recommend you keep it creditor debit only so that WrestlingIQ can auto charge them. I'm gonna set up three dates, just making a hundred bucks for easy purposes here, I'm gonna set the first one to March 1st.

[00:08:30] I'm gonna set the second one to April 1st and the third one to not $10,000. May 1st.

[00:08:44] All right. And I'm also gonna do an upfront one just in case you want to offer that. I'll show you that too.

[00:08:51] You can check this if you have sibling discounts as well. I'm not gonna do that in this demo, but that is there and available for you. That will automatically be applied at [00:09:00] checkout when someone is registering two kids at the same time.

[00:09:06] And, can someone sign up after the start date. You mean with installment plans? I'm assuming that's what Jeff means. Yes, you can. Yeah, that's what I meant. Like if the first one's March one. So for example, I have camps in June and you know, it's a $900 ticket item. Wanna do three payments, but I'm worried.

[00:09:27] The first payment's February one, somebody signs up February 5th. How does that, how does that work? Yep. So with installments, if you're signing up past the installment dates, it's going to charge you for every date in the past at the moment of checkout. So in this example, if we're signing up on March 2nd, we're gonna get charged a hundred dollars upfront.

[00:09:48] The next one won't be until the next scheduled payment. Similarly, if you didn't sign up until April 2nd, you would pay 200 bucks upfront, and the next one's a hundred bucks. So it's sort of, [00:10:00] you'll get the same amount of money. There'll just be more upfront money they have to pay for their registration.

[00:10:10] Couple options here. We want this. We're not gonna have a capacity limit. Keep that unchecked. This one is very important to keep checked. For our purposes of automating downstream . This is a welcome email, so feel free to add, you know, make sure you bring water.

[00:10:34] Maybe you'll put in a location link here. First day of practice. This, this text will get emailed out the very first day of practice, or as soon as they register. All right, so we've got that. We've got four to seven. The next step, because I'm gonna do two age groups because I want them to be distinct rosters downstream, [00:11:00] which are linked to distinct messaging groups.

[00:11:02] There is, however, a helpful replicate button over here, so we're gonna do that. I'm gonna change the ages here to eight to 14. I want everything to be the same, essentially for these people. Same pricing, same everything else, and we're gonna save it. Okay, so now we have the actual registrations. We've got one for our four to seven group, one to eight to 14.

[00:11:38] These links you can send out if you want to explicitly send people a registration link, but I will show you what I recommend generally in a second here,

[00:11:51] the, as you can see, so just to give you an example of what that tip looked like. So because I bracketed like this, if I were to have another [00:12:00] thing down here in brackets, I can sort of control the alphabetical ordering here by using brackets. But you'll see that now we've got two things that are open for registration, but before we go through that, there's a few other things to that I think we should do here.

[00:12:17] And that is automations basically. How does WrestlingIQ actually save you time once someone registers for this thing? So if we pop over to the roster roster tab we've, these are the two rosters we. Just created no one's on them yet, but they're here. And anytime a wrestler gets added to that registration and pays for it, they'll automatically get synced to that roster.

[00:12:43] Similarly, on the messaging front, you'll notice we now have two distinct messaging groups that are linked to the freestyle roster. So anytime someone gets added to that freestyle roster, [00:13:00] usually through a registration they paid for, they'll also get added to this messaging group, including the parents or any other guardians that are linked to that wrestler.

[00:13:10] And this is why I recommend doing it by age group, is because you now have distinct messaging groups as well downstream. That's great for scheduling purposes, calendar purposes, announcements that are only relevant to those groups.

[00:13:24] And finally, Ah, it's all wrestlers are roster. So lemme touch on that briefly. There's probably another use case here, which is, if you wanna see all the wrestlers on your team for that for this season, not by age like we have there, you can create a roster that is synced to both of them. So, I'll do that here [00:14:00] and now once I save this, we've got another roster here, and this will be linked to anyone who registers for either of those will now get linked to this freestyle roster as well. You can create a All wrestlers group at that point and sync it to the All wrestlers group. So now as you'll see, we've got the two registrations, one for each group. We've got the three rosters distinct by age and a all wrestlers group, plus the three messaging groups that [00:15:00] we're primarily gonna be coordinating with. You could see how to extend this if you had another age group, if you had multiple locations, maybe you have an all wrestlers for each location group that is backed into those roster automations.

[00:15:15] This is sort of the building blocks here. Rosters is how most automations happen in WrestlingIQ, so making sure you've got that down is gonna be really helpful for you in season.

[00:15:29] The next step in getting your auto area season set up is to create schedule. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a few events here on March.

[00:15:49] Again, I'm gonna use the same notation that I did last time for the age groups. So you'll probably have, if you're club like the one I'm demoing, you'll have different practice times [00:16:00] or each age group to make.

[00:16:09] Five to six for the little kiddos every Monday and Wednesday.

[00:16:20] Also, good idea to color coordinate to make sure any events have a color coordinated group. This is important. Here I am going to link it to the four to sevenf, freestyle group. I just. That's gonna be used for attendance downstream. I'm also going to market as this registration. This will add a registration link to the public facing calendar if you're using that through WrestlingIQ team. I'm gonna skip these two for now. I recommend putting a Google maps share link here for location though.

[00:16:58] And whatever notes you need is great [00:17:00] things to bring for the beginner wrestlers. What to expect that kind of.

[00:17:07] And then I'm going to also do

[00:17:14] eight to 14, same thing.

[00:17:22] Make that bit longer.

[00:17:23] Yeah, we can,

[00:17:28] I'll show you that. Yeah, I'll, I'll do the Google Maps feature as well here for this particular one to show you that on the public calendar.

[00:17:48] Eight, 14. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Same thing there.

[00:17:57] So the best links to share are go to [00:18:00] share, copy that link, pop that in there.

[00:18:07] Hey, Dwight, you got a question on there as well? Yeah, yeah. Does the, you know, us does the maps work internationally? Is, is this Google? Yeah, so this is just a link. So the location field will pick up any links or attempt to, so if you have a different provider than Google Maps, as long as it's a link that's shareable, Uhhuh , it'll be clickable on the public schedule.

[00:18:31] Cool. So let's. Show you that here briefly. So now if you're using the public schedule page, or in device case, their website is run through us in WrestlingIQ, which is a public schedule like this, your location is now clickable. Okay. And your registration, since I linked it to that session, is also clickable from there.[00:19:00] 

[00:19:00] Gotcha. Okay. Thank you. Mm-hmm. . . So that's, that's sort of the top things on the calendar is first registrations. Then make sure your rosters and messaging groups are all in alignment. Then create your calendar and make sure you're linking your rosters, your session, and adding those links for the location is sort of the, you've got it all together at that.

[00:19:25] Yeah, and that's the, so this is, if you haven't seen this, this is available in your team settings. There is a, this page, which is the one I recommend you promote for registrations typically, and there's also your public schedule. This is available to every WrestlingIQ team. And a lot of teams that use WrestlingIQ but not for their website, will link out to the schedule cuz this will auto update based on whatever you put in your WrestlingIQ calendar.[00:20:00] 

[00:20:00] All so advanced topics we're running long time, huh? The next thing, I think the best part would be just to give you a quick demo of what that looks like from the restaurant parent perspective. I know that's a question I get a lot and let's do it. So I'm over on the team registration page that is available to all teams.

[00:20:25] I'm gonna sign up a new kid for the four to seven group

[00:20:31] and let's create an account.

[00:20:38] So with a full season,

[00:20:45] this is what you're seeing. You have to create your email, password and first name. With camps, it would just be first name and email. That's a little bit optimized there. Next step as a parent or guardian registering is [00:21:00] the questions I configured for parents. So there's a phone number here. Address is optional.

[00:21:05] I'd mostly include that so you can see what that looks like. Next up, we're adding a wrestler.

[00:21:21] Upload a photo with that as well.

[00:21:33] Sure. This is the USA Wrestling page that we configured early on. So it's part sales page. It's not integrated, but it's basically telling the parent why they need to purchase it and also gives them a link to purchase it. So this will take them there. They do that, they come back, type in the numbers.

[00:21:55] I'm gonna do a fake one.[00:22:00] 

[00:22:02] And that's gonna be on the rest of the record afterwards.

[00:22:11] These are the wrestler specific questions that we configured. Not too many, just enough. We need, these are the e-signatures at this point. This is the liability form. Notice it's per wrestler, per parent. I signed and then we're gonna give it a signature

[00:22:36] and then we're gonna pay. These are for sessions. They only have one option. It'll just go to the credit card page. But since we have installments end up front, it's giving us that option. I'll pick installments. For nonprofit clubs, you're gonna get a little donation upsell here too before they register.

[00:22:53] This converts pretty well for some clubs because their wallet's already out. They wanna support you and some people [00:23:00] can, some people can't. So we just give them that opportunity. And this is the demo server. So this is the fake credit card. I apologize, that's not gonna work anywhere else. And once we've.

[00:23:17] That's gonna be charged on March 1st. As a parent, I'm now in WrestlingIQ and have access to the calendar to messaging. I can invite my spouse if I have one or other guardians, I can invite my wrestler if they need to be part of the team as well. Usually for older kids, that's helpful. And ask them to download the app.

[00:23:40] So back over. Let's go look at what that looks like. So now under registrations, we should have one registrant here and they're gonna be charged on March 1st. There, which is great. Three times.[00:24:00] 

[00:24:01] On the roster, we now have that wrestler linked here in messaging. That parent is now already added to that group. And attendance-wise, if you're taking it, if we're popping over here since we link the roster, you'll notice that roster is already applied here to the attendance filter. So it's really easier for coaches to take attendance mat side once you do.

[00:24:28] That is, so that's the overview. There's, that's all I've got in terms of actual programming to review. Its create your registrations, make sure your rosters and messaging automations are set up correctly, fill out your calendar and then promote your season. Are there any other questions before we hop off here?

[00:24:58] I have one, it's Rick. [00:25:00] Hey Rick. Good information. So we have wrestling and boxing. Mm-hmm. . So is there a BoxingIQ or? No, but we do have some teams that mix so, as long as you're okay with WrestlingIQ, being in the url and wrestling being part of the experience. Yeah. We have clubs that offer like a weightlifting add-on to their membership for the parents, for example, or boxing in this case would be another good example.

[00:25:31] Perfect. Okay. Good. Good. Mm-hmm. ? Yeah. Thanks. Of course. I have a question, Matt, can you one of the things that was super helpful for me as, as a club, you know, owner using it was the, Public calendar and the ability to have like those registrations linked and stuff. That was something I stumbled upon.

[00:25:50] Mm-hmm. . Um, Can you show us how maybe more? I, I actually you could go to my account if you want. But I put in some of my practices, like full info expectations, right. [00:26:00] Writing that information so people, when people see that event It eliminates a lot of questions coming back to me. Right. That's my goal is so that I'm not bombarded with questions.

[00:26:08] Let me see if I can pull up my calendar and I'll send you Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't done it for all of them, but I've started to, so go to like a Sunday. Okay. And go to like level two level. Yeah. There you go. That's exactly. So yeah, this is a great example. This is the notes field. This is the notes field, and then I have the registration for the clinic.

[00:26:27] So essentially this is almost 100% eliminated questions for me from parents that are drop-in parents. And so that way I can just send them, you know, the, Hey, check out the link and, you know, go to the class you wanna register for. They click on literally the link at the bottom, they register. and I've been doing the same thing with my private lessons.

[00:26:46] It just makes it a lot more seamless for me where they can register for the program on the weekday classes. If you go to a weekday class as well, like a level two. Again, I need to, I need to tighten it up, but I've attempted that at least there. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. This is [00:27:00] great. I mean, a lot of parents, one of the things they explore when you're finding out if you want your kid in wrestling is the schedule.

[00:27:06] So if it's right there, it's one less thing they have to find to get into the registration process.

[00:27:13] Yeah. That's great. Anything else? Hannah? You got anything? You've got the big club over there. Hopefully this was helpful for you. Yeah, this is super helpful and especially when we're gonna have someone retraining someone to, to help me out here. So this is gonna be super helpful. You're gonna send this recording, correct?

[00:27:29] Yes. I will make sure everyone gets it. Great. All right. Well, thank you everybody. I appreciate it that you're jumping on the very first one too. No, son and John, but love it. Good stuff. Yeah. Thank you, Dwight. Thank you guys for this. This is awesome. Of course. All right. Thank you all. Have a good week. Hey, talk soon.

[00:27:50] Bye guys. Hannah, say hi to Mike for me. I will . Bye guys. Rick, Dwight. Nice to meet you guys. Bye.