When you’re registering many different audiences for a single event there are times when you need to validate that a person is authorized to take advantage of a specific path, validation codes provide a simple interface to manage that need.  Within the ConferenceEdge SaaS platform there is an easy way to utilize them effectively and maximize your ROI for every event.So you’re asking yourself, what are validation codes and what can they do for me? The short answer is that they allow to to add a layer of security to your registration process.

The audience for your event can be made up of many different targets (members, non-members, exhibitors, etc.) and you may want to offer different packages, prices and sessions for each of these targets. Let’s take a basic example comparing members and non-members for your event, where you may offer a special price for a session to your members.

Our platform will allow you to set up the different pricing for these targets, but how do you ensure that people coming to the site to register are actually members? While it’s true that you can probably catch a non-member who registered as a member prior to them attending your event, it would be simplier and more effective to try and prevent them from registering for it in the first place.

You likely have a members database with unique identifiers (e.g. member ID) for each of your members, wouldn’t it be great if the system could ask each registrant claiming to be a member to enter their member ID and have it check against your dB to see if it’s a valid member ID?

This is where validation codes come into play by allowing you to setup name value pairs (e.g. memberID: 123456) within our system that can be used to validate a registrants data to determine whether they should be authenticated for the target (e.g. member) that they are selecting.

You can upload a file or event connect via an API to provide our platform with the required data. For the security conscious it is important to note that we do not have access to your confidential data on your members, it’s just code data for our system and therefore allows you to keep your private data private.

Validation codes are even more flexible with the added features.

• Termination Date: Set a date for each name value pair after which the code is no longer valid.
• Available Uses: Allow the code to be used more than one time, such as in the case of a group or team.
• Used Count: View and Manage how often a code has been used, change the value to allow reuse.
• ListID:  Add a listID to each validation code and you can easily delete an entire list of codes in one click.

There is no 100% solution when dealing with registrants, however, it’s in your best interest to mitigate the issues where you can and validation codes are a good place to start.