Online Entry - on the day payment

[ryeland of doom]

An email a few days before is no problem - its just the non returnable entry fees that are the killer - that is £50ish and totally unaceptable. Agreed some are lucky, but when you are a virus magnet with two dodgy legs,,,,, Any other sport, I would have packed up ages ago, but I am hopelessly hooked.

There is another big problem with preentering everything. It used to affect me, and partly led to me taking a break from the sport - Work! Many jobs can call you in or let you go on a day. A Sunday booked for work can suddenly be freed up - but you cannot go to that event down the road -no EOD or vice versa and another donation made. I am free of this pest now, but others are not so lucky.

Don't turn them away - give them a blank map.

[frog]

We did email organiser entry and pay on day for our event yesterday to try and get an idea of map and food numbers.
That worked fairly well, although we underestimated EODs and could have done with 2 more maps.
I agree that for small events with low entry fees (and this one had prizes and free ginger wine) then map costs are a significant amount and as our maps seem to need regularly remapping we don't want to be left with loads of extra maps now we mainly use preprinted ones.
I'd rather email the organiser to be sure of a map than turn up at crack of dawn with everyone else and queue for hours. I like my lie ins on weekends.

[Roger]

Ryeland: I haven't seen anyone arguing for no EOD, merely that pre-entry (with some advantages like guaranteeing a map) should be available and encouraged.

[lindseyk]

The maps for our next club event are A3 and we're obviously keen to avoid the 100 unused maps that we had last year in the corresponding event (although they were only A4 so not quite so expensive). We use Autodownload so the issue of saving time on the day isn't relevant, just saving money on maps. Printing blank maps is a sort-of solution but they cost the same as overprinted ones.

I'm interested in Pyrat's comments about using Oentries with no fee but another thought I had would be to put a spreadsheet onto Googledocs and ask people to fill in their name and course if they think they will attend, then pay on the day. No threats, no surcharges, just an explanation that we're trying to avoid waste.