How to Set Up Your Event on Onevie, From Registration to Check-in

Before you start: decide who’s coming

Sketch out who will attend before you touch any settings. Onevie treats each group of attendees differently, with its own questions, price and badge, so this list shapes everything that follows. A typical conference has:

• Delegates
• Speakers
• VIPs and press
• Sponsors and exhibitors
• Staff and volunteers

Note three more numbers while you’re at it: expected attendance, the number of entrances, and when most people will arrive. Together they decide how many check-in points you’ll need on the day.

Step 1: Set up your tickets

Each ticket type gets its own price, sales window and capacity. A few patterns that work well:

• Early bird, standard and late prices that change on their own schedule, so nobody has to remember to switch them at midnight.
• Free registration for speakers, press and staff, kept out of your revenue totals automatically.
• Group and corporate rates, booked by a lead booker and invoiced together.
• Promo codes for partners, with caps, expiry dates and usage counts.

Payments are collected in naira by card, bank transfer or Paystack. Payment status sits on each attendee’s record, so an unpaid ticket can’t print a badge by accident, and finance can see what’s paid, pending and refunded for every tier. More on ticketing and payments.

Give each ticket type a capacity. When one sells out, a waitlist takes over and promotes people automatically when a place frees up.

Step 2: Build the registration form

Build the form from blocks: text, dropdowns, file uploads, dietary and access requirements, and consent. Keep it short with conditional questions that only appear for the people they apply to, based on their ticket type, attendee type or an earlier answer. Members see member questions, sponsors see sponsor questions, and one form does the work of five.

If some registrations need checking first, such as a member rate, a press pass or an invitation-only session, turn on approvals. A pending registration holds its place without issuing a badge, and your team can approve it, waitlist it or ask for more information. More on registration.

Step 3: Publish and share your registration page

Publish the form to a branded page with your event’s own look, then share the link by email or WhatsApp. Moving from another registration system? Import your existing list instead, with validation on the way in.

Every approved registration gets a QR code straight away, delivered by email or WhatsApp. That code is the attendee’s ticket at the door, so there’s nothing to export or reconcile later.

Step 4: Plan your messages

Most event email is the same handful of messages retyped with new dates. Set them up once as a journey and let the triggers send them:

• A confirmation carrying the attendee’s QR code, sent on registration or approval.
• Joining instructions with the venue, entrance, arrival window and what to bring.
• A reminder the day before, by email and WhatsApp.
• Room changes and delays, sent only to the people they affect.

Messages pull each attendee’s name, ticket type, sessions and QR code from their record, and can wait for a sensible hour in the attendee’s time zone instead of arriving in the middle of the night. More on communications.

Step 5: Plan the door

This is where the earlier steps pay off. Your kiosks and check-in counters read the same list as the registration form, so a change made at 07:40 is on every kiosk at 07:41. Attendees scan their QR code and their personalised badge prints on the spot, with no boxes of pre-printed badges to sort through.

Before the day, decide:

• How many kiosks or counters you need for your busiest arrival time. Not sure? Share your numbers with us and we’ll recommend a setup.
• Where walk-ins, reprints and questions go, so they don’t hold up the main queue.
• Which badge format and lanyards you’ll use.

How quick can it be? At Abuja International Photo Festival, more than 500 guests checked themselves in at Onevie kiosks in under 45 minutes, each in under 10 seconds.

Running sessions or restricted areas?

If some rooms are only for VIPs, press or paid workshops, set access rules per session. A scanner on the room door checks the badge the attendee already has and stops at the room’s capacity, and you get attendance per attendee for certificates, CPD or sponsor reports. More on session and access tracking.

Step 6: Prepare for weak venue internet

Venue Wi-Fi tends to struggle exactly when the doors open. Nexus, Onevie’s portable on-site server, keeps check-in and badge printing running locally:

1. Sync your registration data to Nexus before the event.
2. Nexus handles verification, check-in and printing on-site.
3. When the internet returns, everything syncs back to the cloud.

On the day, and after

Live dashboards show arrivals, walk-ins and reprints as they happen, and how full each room is. The door report is ready while the keynote is still running. After the event, attendance, payments and session history are ready to export for finance, sponsors and your post-event report. More on dashboards and reports.

Your setup checklist

• Attendee types and expected attendance agreed
• Ticket types, prices, capacity and promo codes set
• Registration form built, with approvals where needed
• Registration page published and shared
• Confirmation, joining instructions and reminders scheduled
• Kiosks or counters, badges and lanyards planned
• Nexus synced before the doors open, if the venue’s internet is uncertain