Are you tired of calling your family members to collect registration fees for an upcoming family reunion?
Here are some online solutions to ease your pain.
It used to be that if you were having a reunion, you would have to call each family individually to collect registration fees.
For the most part, you heard the proverbial “check is in the mail” routine as families tried to avoid committing till the last moment.
The problem with collecting registration fees manually is that it is very time consuming to call and track who has paid and who had not. Also, it is very difficult to budget for a family reunion if you don’t know how many are actually coming. To make matters worse, the family reunion committee has to end up fronting the money to cover for late paying attendees.
Here are four ways to collect family reunion registration fees online:
1. MyEvent.com is where you can set up a reunion website that has the capability of collecting registration fees online. Your attendees can pay with a credit card and you can track who is coming, all in real-time. What makes my event.com unique is that it’s very easy to set up, and they specialize in family reunion websites. Click to read our review of family reunion website vendors.
2. Eventbrite is a great way for family reunion planners to collect money online. You can post your event details, collect funds and track payments online. Set up is easy and the charges are palatable. At the time of this writing, they charge $1 per registration fee plus any additional fees associated with credit cards.
3. PayPal – if you are using a Facebook group or blog as a family reunion website, then PayPal becomes a very good payment option for registration fees. Simply open up a PayPal account and connect it to the family reunion bank account. Set the registration fees and post the link to your Facebook group or blog. Once again, the set up is simple and the monies show up in your account in two business days. Alternately, you can post the PayPal link on your family reunion website as well. The disadvantage to PayPal is that you can’t track who has paid automatically. That part is going to stay manual.
4. Google checkout – similar to PayPal, this method of payment is easy to set up and/or integrate into your family reunion website. As with Paypal, there is no way to track automatically who has paid and who has not. That part will stay manual.
If we had to select one of the three choices above, we would use MyEvent.com. Their reporting capabilities along with easy setup and toll-free customer support are absolutely worth the $15 monthly charge.
Regardless of the method you are using, getting registration fees online makes a cumbersome task a lot easier. Not only is collecting reunion funds easier, there’s the added benefit of increased family reunion attendance and easier refunding for those that cancel. Once you start collecting payments online, you won’t miss those “Checks in the mail”.
What should you read next?
Since you’re looking at building a website, take a look at our family reunion website section.