Register someone in the UK

[MDARC]

We have someone trying to register from the UK for our event. We require a state at registration but apparently the UK does not have states. We don't want to stop requiring a state as most of our registrants are from the US. Any suggestions?

[William_A]

Hello @MDARC ,

If you're going to have registrants from outside the US, then you'd need to not have State be a required field. At this time, the State dropdown only includes US and Canadian states/provinces and territories.

[MDARC]

William,

Thank you for contacting us, and you raise a good point. One cannot complete our registration form without selecting a U.S. state or Canadian province. That is an issue.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer. I discussed the problem with our Registration Chairs. They do a lot(!) of manual labor to prepare and print the attendee badges in all their various formats, then get the correct badges, antenna seminar & banquet tickets and other items into the correct envelopes, etc. It's a lot of work for them. Since the vast majority of our attendees are from the U.S., not having the state as a required field would potentially compound that work, requiring that they manually look up the state for each of those that skip that field.

The true solution is to add an entry in the drop-down list of state/provinces for "Other" or "Outside North America" or something similar. I spoke with the help desk at Constant Contact, the company we use for our registrations. They offered a work-around, but it wasn't a usable one. The glimmer of good news is that they have taken this as a request and may add it to their next generation of form formats, which they say should be out later this year. So perhaps we'll have a fix for next year.

For this year, the only thing I can think of for you is to just choose a state from the field and move on. Not great, but it should work.

Thankx again for bringing this to our attention, and I hope to see you at Pacificon.

Mike Patterson, N6JGA
Pacificon Web Administrator