Do you like hosting flying events? I hope so...I do. Do you enjoy all the organization that goes on to make the event happen? I doubt it...I never did.

It's hard to make it all come together and then the biggest fear is noone showing up. Obviously the success of an event comes with good participation - without it, there would be no event. So with modern events, you need to have a web-presence to advertise your event. C'mon, you agreed to host an event because noone else would do it and now you need to program a website to promote it?

Now that's done for you here at GoFlyXC.com. All you need is a user account (it's free) and to sign up all you need is your email address. Once signed up and logged in you just simply fill out a form with all of your event's info and you instantly have a website for your event with useful tools to help you register your participants:

Tools such as:

• event calendar - your event goes on a REAL event calendar. Not one that is just a text listing on some website. Those lists manually have to get updated (and rarely do). Someone physically has to go in there and edit the list to remove the old ones and put up new ones. Our event listing automatically archives old events so you can focus on current events. Users can even subscribe their personal calendaring program to get auto-updates of all events listed here.
• registration form - on your event there is a registration form...a real useful one. It isn't just a form that the contents gets emailed to the event admin for you to do manage a list of participants somehow. Form entries gets added to your private registrant admin list (see the "Signups" tab at the top of your event page) which allow you to manage your users' registration status - approve their submission, mark them as pending payment, wait-list them if you've reached capacity or even cancel them. Emails are automatically sent to the user with their status change.
• sending emails - it's a pain manually collecting registrants emails, adding them to your computer's address book, creating a group and emailing all of them with your email program. Event owners have a "Signup Broadcast" tab at the top of their event that allows them to send an email thru the site to all registrants...without managing their email addresses at all.
• event roster - come event time, there is a "print roster" option to event admins that lets you print off their information in a single document to use to confirm things at registration and give to the scorer to enter into the scoring software. We'll also be adding the ability to download it to an Excel file for importing or manipulation.
• live list of registrants - it also posts a live list of who is registered and it will show (in the near future) things like their registration status and where they are from. We feel this helps foster more registrations as pilots see what other pilots are coming to the event and also urges them to pre-pay you faster if the entrant limitations are tight.

And this is all free. Value that at the amount of time it'll save you while organizing your event.

We're leaving signups open for all events even it we can't convince event organizers to use this system as their official registration. They'll still have access to all the great tools above but even if they don't use it, the advantage is for the registrants as they will have access to sending private messages to other participants prior to and after the event. It helps them keep in touch with the friends they've made along the way an encourage them to attend future events their new friends are going to.

Enjoy!