Originally posted in the Mountain Region community.
My supervisor asked me to see if other orgs were doing manual event attendance, versus using the scanners. Is that a thing?
I know the system was designed to be used with scanners, but we were wondering if there are in fact cases where a printed list and good old-fashioned checking people in was preferred. If you do manually pull an attendance list (and manually enter your attendees after the fact), can I ask what type of events you do that for? Why does a manual process work for you, in that case?
Clearly you don't want to be spending a whole day checking hundreds of people in when you could spend one hour equipped with a scanner or two and check in the same number of people.
I'm all ears...
We are a museum and we host a variety of programs. We use scanners for museum admission and most programs. However, for things like opening receptions, we just count the number of people who attend with a clicker and then put in tickets after the fact. We then use a custom utility to mark those tickets as attended. For offsite events, we bring a list and either scan the tickets on-site later that day or I manually enter who attended. If it is a larger event, then I use the utility and don't worry about which specific tickets get marked as attend. We're more interested in having an accurate number.
I think my museum would benefit from having a clicker for a similar reason. Right now we do tally marks on a piece of paper (which is almost always wrong) for our really big events like that. Have you seen an improvement in accuracy from using one? And are your associates good with using it? They are cheap enough on Amazon; I just wanted to see if they are worth it before I buy one.