Registering for an event in the Portal signs you up to attend, present, or exhibit. Your association uses one event form where you choose your registration type, answer questions, add purchases, and pay. After you finish, Rhythm takes you straight to your new registration.
Prerequisites
You must be signed in to the Portal with an account linked to a contact record. The registration page needs to know who is registering, so it will not load when you are signed out. This is true even when the event page itself is public. Registration pages are private by design and do not support open, anonymous registration from an external site. Making a registration page public does not allow anonymous sign-up, and it can stop the sign-in prompt from appearing correctly. When registration is limited to members, expect the registration page itself to be private, and register only while signed in with your own Portal account.
Your contact profile in the Portal should be complete. If required profile information is missing, you may need to add it from your main Portal profile before you can finish registering.
If you need to create an account before you register, finish the full account creation flow first. That includes verifying your email address and completing any profile fields your association requires. If you return to the event’s registration page before those steps are done, registration may not continue.
The event’s online registration must be open. At least one registration process for the event must have an open date in the past; if none has opened yet, registration options do not appear.
You must not already have an active or pending registration for this event.
If the event tracks capacity and is sold out, you can register only if you were offered a waitlist place.
Start Your Registration
- Open the event’s registration page. For an event published in your association’s main Portal, choose Registration from the event’s navigation banner near the top of the page, or use the registration page’s direct URL if your association shared one. For an event with its own microsite, use the registration link your association provided. Rhythm does not support a link that jumps directly to one specific registration process within an event, so start from the event’s registration page and choose from the options shown there. If your association set up the event as portal integrated, use that portal-integrated registration URL instead of a separate microsite registration link. Using the wrong link for the event’s setup is a common cause of registration problems. Removing an event from the portal’s list of upcoming events does not close registration by itself. If a registration process is still open and has no close date, a direct event or registration link can still work even when the event no longer appears while browsing the portal.
- Choose the registration type that applies to you, such as Member or Non-Member. If the type you need requires a coupon, enter it in Coupon Code: before you continue.
- If the form asks you to confirm your contact details or your organization’s details, review them and make any corrections. Saving your organization’s details here can create a new organization record, even if your association has turned off automatic organization creation during Portal sign-up elsewhere. This can happen even if you do not finish checkout afterward.
- Fill in the registration form. Depending on how your association set up the event, you may choose guests, sessions, function tickets, add-ons, and badge text. See See What an Event Costs for how packages and add-ons are priced, and Register for and View Your Function Tickets for buying tickets to a dinner or other function.
- Review your order and pay to finish. If your association has turned on Pay Later for this event, you may be able to complete registration with an invoice to pay afterward instead of paying immediately. Even when your total is $0.00, you still need to complete the review-and-checkout step. A fully discounted registration does not finish automatically without it.
Result
Rhythm takes you to your new registration, where you can see what you registered for. If the event’s registration process allows changes, you can update it later. See View or Modify Your Registration in the Portal.
On an event microsite, selecting Continue after you finish registering should take you to the microsite’s My Registration page. From there, selecting Go Home should return you to the event’s home page. If either action does not seem to do anything, the microsite’s View My Registration or Event Landing page may not be published. That does not mean your registration is incomplete, so check your registration status directly or contact your association instead of registering again. If you are signed in but not registered for the event and open the My Registration page directly, you should see a message that you are not registered. If the page spins endlessly instead, that is not expected, and you should contact your association. If you started creating your Portal account from an event registration page or a microsite link, verifying your email should bring you back to that same registration flow instead of sending you to the main portal home page.
The confirmation email’s start time has occasionally appeared one hour off from the time configured on the event, even though the date is correct. This is a known display issue in the email’s time field. If you see a mismatch, use the event’s own page for the correct time.
Registration Types and Packages Differ by Person
The registration types you see depend on your association’s setup. Your association can limit a type so only certain contacts see it, and some types appear only to guests, speakers, or exhibitors who register through those paths. If you expected a type or package and do not see it, your membership status or the event’s setup may be the reason. The Portal shows options based on registration setup your association manages in Rhythm’s Console, so seeing an option here does not mean it is stored or configured only in the Portal. Passing an eligibility check elsewhere also does not guarantee that a package appears here, because the Portal display can depend on more than eligibility alone. Contact your association if you believe an option is missing. If your event is portal integrated instead of a standalone microsite, you also cannot reach the event’s Documents or Papers from here; those are available only through a standalone microsite.
If your association sells memberships through event registration, the form may let you join or renew during the same checkout as your event registration. This requires setup in both places: membership must be added to the event’s registration form, and the event’s own renewal period must be set. When both are set up, the membership portion follows your association’s existing membership eligibility and pricing rules, and you complete everything in one payment. Whether you see this option depends on how your association configured the event.
When you choose a session with its own fee, Rhythm charges the session fee for your registration package instead of using a generic price. This means two people in different packages can attend the same session and pay different amounts.
If Registration Isn't Available
You may reach the registration page and be unable to continue for one of these reasons:
- Registration hasn't opened yet. Every event registration process has an open date, and none of the event’s processes has reached that date yet. If you believe registration should already be open, the cause is usually a scheduling setting on your association’s side, not a broken link. If an event does not appear when you browse the portal, check the event’s registration window with your association before assuming the portal link is broken. A scheduling setting is the more common cause. Contact your association to check.
- Registration has closed. Every process for the event has passed its close date. An incorrect close date, such as a date accidentally set to a past year, commonly causes this message to appear when your association intended registration to remain open. If you believe this is a mistake, contact your association to check the date. In rare cases, an event with only one registration type has kept accepting registrations after its close date and time passed. If you can still register for that kind of event well after its published deadline, that is not necessarily expected, and letting your association know helps them catch it.
- You're already registered. Rhythm allows only one active or pending registration per contact for an event. If you try to register again, you may see a plain message that you are already registered. You may also see a more technical-looking error saying the person is already registered for the event. Both messages mean the same thing: open your existing registration instead of starting a new one. See View or Modify Your Registration in the Portal. If an error appears while your order is processing, including a technical-looking access-denied message right after you submit, do not assume the registration failed and submit again right away. The original registration or order may already have been created. Clicking the registration action again after that kind of error can create an extra, sometimes incomplete registration instead of fixing the first one. Check whether you already have a registration for the event first.
- The event is sold out. If the event tracks capacity and has filled up, you cannot register unless you have been offered a place from the waitlist. The sold-out screen may offer to add you to the event’s waitlist instead.
- The page won't load, or shows a blank or white screen. This has several possible causes, roughly in order of likelihood. If registration works for other people, or works for you on another device, the issue is probably with your original device or browser rather than the event page. Start by clearing your browser’s cache, trying another supported browser or an incognito or private window, and testing from another device if you can. Also consider whether a browser extension or corporate device restriction is blocking the page, or whether you are signing in with Google or another social account. A newly created account has also failed to load a login-required event page after email verification was complete. Signing out and back in, or trying again after a short wait, can help. A VPN connection has also interfered with portal registration. If you are using one, disconnect from the VPN and try registering again. If you started creating your account from the event’s registration page and then returned before finishing email verification and your Portal profile, you may appear signed in while the registration page still will not load. Finish verification and profile setup first, then return to the event. A blank page can also mean the registration page’s security is set to public instead of requiring sign-in, or that a page in the registration journey, such as a contact-details or email-verification page, shows as published but is not actually working. Your association can check both. If none of this resolves the issue, clear your cache and contact your association. A screen recording of what led up to the blank page can help them investigate faster.
- The page loads, but you can't see or reach a field or button, or Next won't advance. Reset your browser’s zoom to 100%, try another browser, and clear your browser’s cookies and cache. These steps fix most display problems, including pages that look cut off or hide part of the form. A registration screen that will not scroll to the bottom has also been tied to one browser rather than the event’s setup. If switching browsers, with Chrome as a common fallback, lets you reach a button that Firefox or another browser was hiding, that confirms a browser issue. If Next stays greyed out, registration has most often already closed, so check that first. Occasionally, a field your association marked as required in setup, but that appears optional on the form, can also keep Next disabled. This sometimes clears after your association re-saves the form, so try again a little later or ask your association to check the fields.
- An error message appears, or the form never finishes loading. If you followed a link from an invitation email, confirm that it matches the registration link your association intends for this event. A mismatched or outdated invitation link is a common reason a registration page will not load at all. A "Configuration Loading" message that never finishes can mean Rhythm could not find your linked organization while setting up the form; contact your association if this happens. An "Unable to initialize web form" message, or another unfamiliar technical error, can mean a brief, platform-wide registration issue rather than a problem with this specific event. Try again in a few minutes before contacting your association.
Tip
If none of these reasons explains what you see, make sure you are signed in with the account you normally use for this association. Registration pages need a signed-in contact so they know who is registering. If you are prompted to sign in partway through registration, Rhythm can send you to the Portal home page instead of back to the registration page after sign-in. If that happens, open the event and its registration page again to continue. On an event with its own Portal page, the registration link itself can appear blank for anyone who is not signed in and appear correctly only after sign-in. A blank link there points to the same sign-in requirement, not a broken page.
Warning
If checkout keeps showing "No Payment Method Selected" after you enter your card details, a VPN connection or an address Rhythm could not save can keep the payment method from sticking. Disconnect from the VPN, re-enter your address carefully, and try adding the card again.