Experience.FellowshipOne.com

Is anyone else having this problem?  I've had it happen for two different events now. 

I'm having one person create a weblink account and then they add their frinds to their account as part of their family.

I'm guessing that they are doing this for one of two reasons. 
1) If the event is free, then they are doing it for ease of registration. 
2) They want to pay for their friends registration.

How have you been keeping this data cleaned up? What have you found works to discourage this behavior?

Thanks for you thoughts,
-Mike

There is no other way for someone to pay for a friends registration without adding the friend to their household. I merge new from websites on a daily basis.

I have this same issue happen ALL the time.  It would definitely be helpful to figure out a way for people to sign up a friend, without adding them to their family. 

The other issue to bring up along similar lines of adding a friend is often times we have church-wide events which involve people wanting to sign up and sit at a particular table, or do an event with a specific leader, or see who is currently signed up at that table - so they can BE with their friends.

It would be revolutionary for F1 to design a weblink ability for people to see the first and last names only of people signed up in a specific room, group, table, event etc.  This would help weblink - and online registrations to become so much easier for the ministries and people involved in creating leader and group assignments after people register.
 

Our other event (vacation bible school) involves over 1,000 people coming to our church to sign up into around 200 groups of kids of all ages.  This last year we organized it all manually which is very tedious.   If we were able to list leaders, and the kids signed up under the leader and offer a search capability for people to see if and where their friends are registered - it would help alleviate many hours of putting groups together and phone calls, and last minute group arrangements.

 

Just a thought!

 

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Kristin Jepson

That's a great suggestion. In development, we are designing a new WebLink experience from the ground up, and this is exactly the sort of thing we want to be able to support.  We are also making a lot of changes to households behind the scenes to "unlock" all the features that currently require someone to be in the same household. 

I can't give any dates when you'll be able to see the results of this work, but I just wanted to chime in and say we are working on the foundations of this.  I can say that it will be much more flexible than it is today.  Your suggestions about more visibility into the details of the event and who is already signed up was new to me.  Please keep these feature suggestions coming.

We have also experienced this unfortunate quirk with Weblink. We weren't sure what was going on with the sytem when we started noticing a lot of huge households with random people in them. We finally realized that it's happening when people are registering for events. They are registering their entire small group and creating a mess. Also, we are noticing a lot of co-ed unmarried households that we're wondering about which are probably a result. However, we're not about to call them up and ask them if they are living together or if they simply attended an event together. So this is creating some problems for us. I really wish they would insert some explanatory language on the first page of registration in big, bold red letters letting people know that they can only register people already IN their household. It should warn them what they're doing if they register non-family.

Has anyone submitted an enhancement request for this???

We have the same issue. The way we deal with it is when people check in for the event, we have them confirm their address and phone number. If the info they give is different than the household they're in, we know split them from that household or to merge that with the correct record. It is by no means a fix for the issue but it helps us validate that our information is correct.

WebLink has changed some of the wording of the household members to be more easily readable. 

 

 You could use the types mentioned above to help eliminate this issue.  Also you need to consider that many times you actually want the person that registered the individual to be able to check them in.  For example: I often bring the neighbors kids to my churches VBS because it is the best and the neighbors like the time off.  I register them online, pay for them, show up with them, and want to check them in with my kids.  

When you are cleaning up the New From Website statuses in Fellowship One be sure to look for duplicates and then merge them into the proper households.  That way if someone registers their adult members of their small groups their assignment and registration moves over to the correct record in F1.