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Best Practices

This document is for curling club managers that are new to Curling IO or club's who's pricing, fees, or discounts have undergone significant changes for the next season.

If you are brand new to Curling IO then your best bet is to start with our tutorial videos here. Making the up front time investment to understand your curler registration system will save you a ton of time and headaches down the road once you've started taking registrations.

We'll start by outlining some general best practices with the reasoning behind them, and then go through specific examples we've seen clubs struggle with.

Individual league registrations​

Use individual registrations when each participant needs their own fees, waivers or eligibility checks. Turn on Participant in the league's Info. Keep team information in the registration form and the event settings.

Review participant requirements before using a team-priced registration. Participant-based fees and waivers need the participant to be identified; building those fees into a team price makes it harder to track them correctly.

Fees and addons​

Create each fee or addon product, then attach it to the products that should collect or offer it. Select Required for a mandatory fee. Configure the appropriate purchase limit if it should be collected only once in a season; ordinary addons aren't automatically seasonal fees.

Use Addons for assignment, required versus optional items and participant limits. Use Association fees for inherited fees.

Discounts​

Keep your discount rules simple enough that Managers and members can explain which price applies. Check combinations, such as a half-season registration with a multiple-product discount, before offering them.

If a discount depends on a registration answer, the product needs both the question and the discount assignment. Use a required choice question when people must answer without automatically qualifying for the discount.

Follow Discounts for setup and criteria, and Form builder for the associated questions. These guides also cover the tools you need for team-size discounts.

Don't spam yourself with registration emails​

Your leagues, competitions, and products have a "Notification email" field. This should only be used to send emails to people who aren't also administrators, like an outside dedicated league manager or someone running a commercial league. If you are an administrator you already have access to all of your recent orders from the orders Screen. If you're sending thousands of emails to your club's email address and someone with access happens to get annoyed and marks any of them as spam, the system will immediately stop sending you any emails, including other potentially important emails.

Use a separate non-administrator email for registration nights​

Ideally all of your members are registering themselves using their own email address, but for for those who are not able to create / sign in to their own email address (even with your help), we recommend creating a separate registration specific account (email) to hold these curler profiles and orders. For example, signing up for a free gmail account like "[email protected]", and using that to sign in a laptop or tablet as a sort of kiosk at the club for in-person registrations.

This not only keeps these curler profiles organized within one dedicated registration-only account, it's also more secure for a public computer since this account won't need or have admin access.

If you want to be able to handle multiple registrations at the same time on this registration account (multiple kiosks), please let us know and we can flag it as a "multicart" account to avoid having these multiple instances of the sign-in from clobbering each other's cart.

FAQ entry on: What is an Account?

Test your registrations​

Make sure that you test each possible registration scenario before you open up registration to your members. This can save you a ton of headaches in the long run trying to fix mistakes and refund payments.

Curling IO has a lot of flexibility, especially when it comes to discounts. This is necessary to support all the different registration methods that different clubs have. Complex setups can result in unexpected outcomes though, so the more complicated your setup, the more testing you should do.

Check the expected questions, fees and discount combinations in the registration flow. If you complete checkout, follow the orders guide for any cancellation or refund; completing a purchase is not a disposable preview.

We have a tutorial video covering what your members experience when registering with Curling IO. This is useful for Managers to understand how it works from the curler's perspective.

Ask us to Review your Setup​

If this is your first time your club is using Curling IO, and you've just finished setting everything up, you may ask us to review your setup.

We ask that you read over the relevant documentation and review our tutorial videos first though.

If this is not the first time your club is using Curling IO, there are premium support products, like a seasonal refresher, available here. This can be helpful for new managers thrown into the deep end (no knowledge transfer).

DO NOT LEAVE THIS UNTIL THE DAY BEFORE REGISTRATION!

Make sure you're set up well in advance of opening registrations and send us a support request to take a look at least 2 weeks before you open registration.