RecChat: Virtual Symposium Preview - 10/07/2021
Episode Summary
In this episode, our host Bret Alarcon is joined by Education Manager, Zach Malloch to preview the following week's Virtual Symposium. 2021's in-person Symposium was cancelled due to COVID so in its place, Free Virtual Symposium sessions on a multitude of exciting topics will be offered and prizes will be given away as well!
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:00
one of my favorite sounds out there.
Bret Alarcon 0:13
I gotta stop sharing. There we go. Hello everyone and welcome to this edition to RecChat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon, and I'm with Zach Malloch say Hi Zack, So we're excited to be doing this RecChat today because we're going to talk about all about the next week's virtual symposium that we have to offer. So Zack has all the deets for that. So, Zack, if you want to fill us in how it's gonna go?
Zach Malloch 0:43
Let's talk some deets Bret. Yes. All right. So, as Brett said, we're very excited next week would normally be our standard single virtual symposium session, which we present every second and fourth Thursday of the month. But well, it was going to be our full blown symposium session. And unfortunately, COVID had some different plans for us, maybe it was because we were going to hold it at the Delta Hotel. Maybe bad planning on our part. But hey, you can only predict so much. So we were going to have originally 60 customers, we opened up for them to come in. But then we started to think about what a long form conference with people in the same room for roughly seven hours of the day, wearing masks and watching a presentation. And it's always a lot of fun when we don't have masks. And we don't have to worry about social distancing, it's kind of impossible. And we do have to worry about socially distancing, and masks. And so we're, we had to cancel that. And instead of just leaving that gap, and that emptiness and all of our hearts, we decided to move to a free virtual symposium preview week, we didn't think we could do the entire symposium virtually. And we didn't think that anybody's attention would really span for three days of roughly seven hours a day of training. So what we did is we picked six topics. And we decided to make those free for absolutely everybody. So generally speaking, the virtual symposium were presenting topics like these on the second and the fourth Thursday of every month, and we give archives to all the subscribers, and it costs $600 per year per organization. So for your entire organization to get access to these twice per month sessions, it's $600, you can have as many people attend as you want to. So you know, if you get a couple 100 People from your organization attending that drives that price down to less than six cents per person per year. And that's pretty useful.
And that's only if you do one session, if you do all the sessions, then you're at fractions of pennies. So the previous week specifically, once again, it's free for all Vermont's systems, customer organizations and their staff, we are going to have two sessions per day 11am and 1pm. And we're going to do this Tuesday through Thursday, we are going to be offering a $50 gift card per session just to kind of draw some excitement and pull a couple extra people in that maybe wouldn't be interested in just having their free time spent in RecTrac training. But maybe that'll make it a little bit worth your time. And we're also going to be giving away an iPad during the last session. And I'll talk a little bit more about the details for how all these are going to work at the end of this RecChat. And then all of these six sessions will be recorded. And they will be posted publicly into the rec chat archives. So if anybody can't make it that day, you will have access to those recordings, you can watch them later, you won't be able to win the prizes, because they'll already been given away. But we're not going to make it so you can't get the extra information, which is maybe really the prize if you think about it. Then we're going to talk a little bit about the session just so you know what's coming up and maybe who in your organization, you could encourage to participate in these. So the first one is going to be on Tuesday at 11 o'clock. And this is going to be report selection and criteria presented by Michael Cianci Anybody that's taken training from Mike knows that he has a really good way with customers. And he doesn't really stand on pretense all that much. So he's really entertaining trainer. And we're going to talk about selecting the proper reports, understanding how the criteria work, those range and the browsers, the date ranges, all that sort of things. We're going to talk about saving criteria templates. So if you have to run reports over and over again, you can save certain settings make it really easy to retrieve those settings and rerun those reports. And we're going to talk briefly about scheduling reports for automation. So for this one, really, anybody that runs reports and RecTrac could potentially benefit from this session, whether you're an admin, a front desk staff, an activity coordinator, if you're ever curious about taking a little bit more power in the way that you run reports, the way that you can configure them and get the details that you're actually looking for. This would be a great one for you to do.
RecConnect. So following that on Tuesday at 1pm Ricci Skitzis is going to be taking us through RecConnect. We're going to be talking about once again picking the right report to run. The report is going to be the basis for How you filter out your people. So RecConnect is just basically a broad way of communicating and sending out mass emails potentially to everybody that happened to sign up for a particular activity, who owns a particular membership who's about to expire in that membership whose credit card needs to be updated on their installment billing record, we can run a lot of different reports to get that information. And most of those reports can be configured to give us a Rec RecConnect output. So we're gonna be talking about the options we have when we're running those the way we can attach history records, we're not sending too many marketing emails to too many people. Week after week, we can kind of target people and then specify that only send it to people who haven't received an email from us in a month,
we're going to talk about the email options, we can do like labeling letters through that. So you can actually print a form letter and then stuff it in an envelope and send it out. And it also ties into the SMS capabilities that we have. And we'll talk about that. We'll also talk about once again, kind of like the first session how we can schedule rec Connect. But in this case, it's not just scheduling a report output, it can actually schedule emails to send automatically. So let's say at the midway through the month, you want to send an email to everybody who's going to expire at the end of the month, we can set that up and automate it for you. So the target audience, program coordinators who might need to get in touch with all the staff or all the members of a session, let's say an activity is rained out, or it's a gym activity in the gym needs to be shut down for the floor to be redone or something, it's a really easy way to get contact to a lot of people quickly. The marketing side of things, if you want to get in touch with your customer base, and let them know what's going on, you can target by potentially dollar spent, or length of time as a RecTrac customer in your organization or various other things. If you're in the membership side of the house working with passes and fitness centers and the like there's a lot of cases for using RecConnect to contact people automatically. And anybody needs to send out mass communication. If there's a reason you could think of doing that that hasn't been listed in here, then you and anybody else that does that I would invite to the session specifically. Next up is report output customization. And Bret
Bret Alarcon 7:09
actually, Zach. Yeah, I was gonna say before you get into the next line items. question was, are these times Eastern?
Zach Malloch 7:16
Oh, yes, they are. I should probably put that in. But yes, 11 o'clock Eastern time for the morning session and two o'clock, or sorry, one o'clock Eastern time for the afternoon sessions. Very good clarification there. Thank you.
So report output customization. Now, there's going to be a bit more covered here. But And Erik, our presenter is actually in Albuquerque at the moment, working with one of our customers, the City of Albuquerque, and so I haven't been able to see his presentation. So I know that he always does a great job. And he's got a lot of information coming for us. But basically, we're going to be showing you how to customize the way the report looks. Once you get it out. If you need to change some of the sorting options if you need to add or remove fields include questions and answers. I think we'll even get into totaling and subtotal in just a little bit. So if you want to change the reports that you have, and get something very specific for a particular reason, maybe to present to a board. Or maybe you're just curious about the way your business works. And there's an extra fields you want to kind of gather once you understand how to run the reports, you want it to output different things, this is all for you. So this will be in the morning of Wednesday 11am Eastern time, then we have rule and Fee Management simplification, a subject very close to my heart. But I'm going to be letting Robert Kirk take the ring reins. For this one, we're going to be talking about ways of making using rules and fees in your database a bit easier. So this isn't going to focus so much on the criteria and the customization of actually building individual things. We'll go over that really basically. But more, it's talking about the most efficient ways of using this in your database, talking about the benefits of linking levels tying something to the category or the Type of the subtype, creating default records so that when you create a new fee, it already has a lot of configuration done for you or a new rule. We're going to compare that to or talk about using that even more powerfully with the rule and fee power Profile, which are other ways of kind of streamlining the path to creating a new rule. So rather than looking down your criteria list, you can set certain buttons up or you can have different default records for different modules. Now we're going to talk about set usage. And this gets a lot of love in this presentation, sets are very efficient way of setting up your database. And if you ended up really loving the way that Robert makes that sound, then we're going to talk about the bulk move utilities which could could potentially simplify your process of starting to use sets if you haven't done so already or in the past in your database and but you'd like the ideas for it.
So in this case, if you're a database administrators or if you're a program coordinator or manager, anybody that has to Build out any rules or fees, then you're definitely part of the target audience for this, especially if you need to maintain them after they've been created, if you run into update the details for any of that sort of stuff. Yeah, if anybody makes rules fees and hopefully you get something out of this session bread, I think I see a couple other questions coming in.
Bret Alarcon 10:21
Yes. Sally wants to know, how long is each session?
Zach Malloch 10:26
Yeah, so we're aiming for an hour, roughly 45 minutes of content? With enough room for plenty of question and answer, we anticipate we're going to get a lot of that discussion kind of forming as a result of some of these sessions. But we're going to try to keep everything around an hour. If we overflow with a lot of extra questions, everybody's willing to stick around for a little bit. But we definitely don't want to step on the next upcoming sessions. And if we end up seeing that there's a topic that just has so many questions that we need to get into other areas, and it goes way beyond the scope of the presentation that we're doing, then we'll definitely take that as impetus to make a specific virtual symposium session for those topics to get dive deeper into different areas in a follow up in the next couple of months.
Bret Alarcon 11:15
And I can't remember if he had a slide for this or not, but do you have like a schedule for the days and times for each?
Zach Malloch 11:21
Yeah, so it's going to be two. And I'll actually edit this maybe right now. I'll just say we are going to dotwo one hour sessions per day, it will be 11am and 1pm. So 11 to 12. Eastern Time, and one to two Eastern Time. Oops, I went a little bit too fast. I was going to put the eastern time keys in there too. There we go. So that is what I should have had on the slide initially here. So when our sessions 11am and 1pm, Eastern Time, Tuesday, 1012, Wednesday, 1013 and Thursday, 1014. I think I had got down to report output customization. So then the next one out, nope, we this is where we were. So then we're going to get on to the first session on Thursday. So WebTrac Next Gen UI. So everybody's probably seen a couple of things about this already if you've been a longtime RecChat user, or if you've been paying attention to some of our releases. So we're going to talk with Luc, one of our implementation consultants about comparing the legacy the old version of rec chat, rec, or WebTrac, sorry. And the Next Gen UI, we're going to talk about the new splash pages, we're going to talk about some of the new mobile responsive options as well as the process of actually deciding to move over to this if you haven't yet, it's a very simple process to do. So Luc is going to show you where the title exists to do it, and even talk a little bit about how you could test it if you're not ready to go live with those changes just yet. In the we'll talk a little bit about some of the the setup steps, or the configuration steps for Screen design, menu design, just real briefly. So if you are already using the Next Gen UI, this will be a useful session for you.
So anybody that does any WebTrac administration, or just general database administration, and anybody that might help your customers, if they call in and they have questions about using WebTrac, it might be useful for them to get in here. So they get a preview of what the changes look like if you haven't started implementing it yet. And of course, it's another great place to ask questions, if you aren't curious about it, or if you've already moved over, but you do have questions. And then we're going to wrap everything up with a did you know, and it's also attract plugin and add on. So this is kind of the salesy side, there's going to be a lot of very useful information and kind of tips and tricks about how you use the software. And then they're going to be doing the overview of various modules and add on some things that we want to put a little bit of a highlight on. And you'll notice that some of these we've already done some RecChats about like the kiosk mode. And we'll be doing future record chats about some of these also, based on interest and curiosity. Now, because this is a little bit more of a salesy thing, we're recommended that, well, anybody who wants to win the chance to win an iPad would be great to come to this one, because this is when we're actually going to be pulling the iPad winner. There will be a $50 gift card winner in this case. But I'll get to the details of that in just a second.
Anybody is curious about all the things that RecTrac can do. And of course, anybody that wants to make or is able to make decisions about adding things to RecChat or RecTrac new features and new capabilities. Now the registration and prizes I see a couple of these questions coming in, right
Bret Alarcon 14:51
actually, it's about this Yeah,
Zach Malloch 14:54
perfect. So you can register right now, the invite to this very RecChat If you go down to there's a link right in there in the text, and then there's a banner at the bottom of that email that I sent out on Tuesday, either of those will bring you to this link. And actually, I will copy that link, and I will paste it into chat, just in case anybody wants to grab it from right here.
Bret Alarcon 15:20
Tried to highlight on your presentation.
Zach Malloch 15:24
Yeah, not gonna work. Not really. Like copy this again, Copy, Paste. Alright, so now I think everybody should be able to see the chat, there's a little icon on the bottom next to where you would use the q&a. And that is a link to the live registration. Now if I take a look at the website, this is where you will get to. So this if we just scroll down, we get to see each of the sessions. If I Click on the expansion, then I get to see kind of a little blurb and the talk about it. And then you get to register right there. You do want to register for each one of these, they are all individual registrations. But you can take this site Vermontsystems.com/symposium, you can send this to anybody in your organization and say, Hey, take a look at what's available here. These are all free sessions next week, you can if you Click on this register Button that will bring you to the Zoom registration, you can copy and send them this link, if you want to, if you want to kind of target who is going to be getting into particular sessions, if you want to pre select them for your staff and your co workers, you can do that. But this is kind of the hub where we have everything I will be sending out another in like broad basically RecChat but broad email invitation about the virtual symposium with this link and all the individual registration links. On Monday, I believe Tuesday's a little bit better time generally to send out the emails but we want to give people time if because Tuesday's when the sessions are actually happening.
So yes, live and available right now Vermontsystems.com/symposium. And you'll be able to sign up for all six of those sessions or anyone's that you want to write. And then the way the word my prizes go, I had a whole There we go. I slightly messed up my order in my slides, but we'll be able to compensate. Alright, so at the end of every session, there is a $50 gift card to give away, you must be in the session, at the time of the drawing for to be able to win, it will be a random selection, basically, I'll run a report to see everybody who's attended, I'll put in the number range based on the number of cells in that Excel report that I get out. And I will put them into a random number generator, and we'll get three random numbers, we'll start with the first one. If that person is still in the session, they get the gift card. If they're not, we'll go to the next and so on. So definitely stick around to the end of each session, if that is the piece that you're interested in. If you're just looking for the gift of knowledge, then go with that as you will. And then the last session once again. Sorry, Brett was that?
Bret Alarcon 18:09
I said everybody's a winner.
Zach Malloch 18:11
Oh, yeah, exactly. That's the goal. So at the very end, we're going to win an iPad and you get one entry per session attended for the entire week. So if you came to all six of the sessions, you're going to have six entries, six chances to win the iPad. And the winner is going to be drawn at the end of the Did you no and track plugin session, the one presented by our sales team Dave and Dylan. In this case, you don't have to be at the session to win the iPad, you would need to be in the session to win the gift Certificate. So hopefully that just gives a little bit of an incentive and excitement to the whole week and kind of builds it out. I see another question.
Bret Alarcon 18:51
Yeah, Joey wants to know, how much do these sessions cost?
Zach Malloch 18:54
These sessions are completely free. I mean, you will have to pay a bit of time and attention. But other than that there is no monetary exchange for these sessions. That's kind of the whole idea of this preview week. Now I will be completely direct with you guys and say that we're hoping that at least a couple of people will like this enough to say that, hey, you know what, I do want to see these types of topics presented every other week throughout the year. And then maybe we'll get some people looking to sign up for it. If you do want to sign up let me just make a real quick, quick slide here for that. To sign up. Subscribe. That's the word I'm looking for. Email sales@vermontsystems.com for quote Okay, I'll get rid of some of the extra pieces that aren't pertinent for that slide. Let's see what happens if I go, here we go. Alright, so if you want to subscribe, if this already sounds awesome to you, then just email sales@vermontsystems.com, tell them you're interested in the virtual symposium, and they will send you a quote, and that quote, will always say the same thing, at least for right now $600 per organization. And once again, this is the whole organization. So exactly like right now where anybody who wants to can sign up for one of these previous sessions, when you're subscribed, I send out an email to all of our subscribers. And they get to distribute that link for that, whatever that particular topic is, to everybody that wants to take that class, or they think we'd benefit from that class. And every one of those is also archived. And actually, if I switch over to
our learning management system, so we put all of the archived pieces into the RecTrac Labs, so they're very convenient to get to if you are subscribing organization. And if we look at our catalog, let's just do symposium. Then you can see that we've already got close to 50 different topics archived here, each one of these is around an hour. The EIC There was another question. So it is $600 per year for the subscription. But once again, if you subscribe, you get all of the previous years, sessions as well. So I'll just kind of like let you see what some of these topics that we have presented in the past are, we're going to have similar things, I always ask people for their own suggestions. So we get a lot of these topics from, from our participants from the customers who participate. That's exactly what I just said, participants and people who participate in the same thing. But we get information from you, we get requests from you. And then I will usually Build out a session or I will find somebody else in Vermont systems who's particularly versed on a topic to talk about. And yes, I agree is Lake I see a question from them just came in. These are these free sessions, the next, the sixth, representing next week are a sample hopefully to get your appetite wet for actually subscribing to the session. But if you don't subscribe, that's totally fine. We're happy just to get more information out there to make people better RecTrac users. So we do hope that you'll subscribe, if you get use from them. It'll kind of give us impetus to keep doing it, it will be able to show everybody that this is still a useful thing. And we'll keep getting to do it.
Bret Alarcon 22:40
But yes, that's his preview with the help of subscription. And Eddie, I see your question about whether the cost gets added to the maintenance or if it's a separate payment, I believe we can do either one. And the sales team is usually pretty happy to work with people on that sort of thing. So the catalog, se Dawn is asking where we can find the catalog. So this I am seeing because I'm actually in the RecTrac Lab, our learning management system, which is also partially what the symposium subscribers are paying for is holding up this lab, where we have a lot of free stuff for people, but the symposium stuff is going to be a subscription piece, at least for right now. As far as getting a listing of this catalog, what I can do is I can Build out a list, I can put it at the end of this PowerPoint, and then I can save this as a PDF. And I can have Brett posted with the RecChat archive when we do it. So another question Bret?
yes, will we continue to do the RecChats?
Zach Malloch 23:48
Oh, yeah, you can take RecChat once you can pry it out of my cold dead fingers, definitely going to be continuing to read chats will always be free. As long as I have any control over it. I find it to be an incredible way to touch base with you our customer base as often as we are, you know, the the weeks we don't do virtual symposium is basically when we do RecChats. So the first third and sometimes fifth Thursday of the month. And yes, we will definitely continue doing this. And actually, that makes a good point for just giving a little bit of the distinction between the two. RecChats are generally around half an hour, they're usually a little bit more geared towards letting you know about new features that we have or just giving you a broad sort of, hey, we've got this thing did you know that you can use it, whereas the virtual symposiums are definitely deeper dives into particular topics. So they're twice the length of the session as a as a minimum that's kind of one of the baselines and we get more into a training scenario where the wreck chats are more of a conversational scenario like hey, did you know this? I'll answer a couple questions for you. But we usually don't go like really deep into the configuration or the the alternate uses for things whereas we do have more of that flexibility with the virtual Symposiums So I think that is getting us towards the end of the questions that I can see at least Brett, is there anything that I missed there?
Bret Alarcon 25:11
Ah, no Autumn wants you to know that. in a Mr. Burns voice she says, excellent. Yes, excellent.
Zach Malloch 25:22
Well, I'm glad to hear that Autumn is excited for that. So excited that she's moved to doing impressions. And that's wonderful. As far as I'm concerned. Well, we'll go ahead and finish this up, then, a couple of minutes early. Give us plenty of time to keep everybody's appetite up and running for next week. So once again, that registration link is Vermontsystems.com/symposium. We've got all of the sessions listed there with a little blurb, so you can get an idea of what it is. And yes, I've actually see Ken who is planning on being here in person, we definitely wish we could be doing the in person one. But this is our next best thing. And actually like that, we'll be able to have a bigger audience and share with more people. Because of this, we'd still like to do the main symposium just because it's a lot of fun to connect that directly with some of our customers, but we will do this. Okay. Well, I will wrap this up. I hope we get a ton of registrations. Look for this email, again, at the beginning of next week, distributed to as many people in your organization as you want to, you know, any questions that you've got, we'll probably go towards future symposium sessions, but we will try to have time in each one of those to answer things for you. And maybe a couple of people will be $50 richer by the end of it. Anyway, I guess we'll finish up. And actually yeah, I did see that one last question coming through. If we go back up here, all sessions are going to be recorded and posted to the RecChat archives. So yes, if you cannot register for them, just go to where you go to rewatch our rec chats, and you will see these symposiums but once again, you won't be able to win the prizes. If you're just watching recording. We'll try to cut the price piece out so we don't make people jealous after the fact. Anyway.
Okay. If anybody has any closing thoughts, we've got that. Otherwise, I will see you next week. Thanks everybody so much.
Bret Alarcon 27:29
Bye, everyone.