Prior to the pandemic, most meetings offered a simple paper sign-in option or a laptop for attendees to input their contact information. To prevent the spread of COVID-19 as we begin offering in-person engagement options, agencies need to provide "contactless" approaches for managing meeting sign-in and speaker signup.

The Public Input Meetings platform has a built-in contactless sign-in and speaker registration function. Here's how to access it and use it for your next meeting.

To access your meeting's contactless sign-in options, head to your meeting or project admin page.

Under the Meetings and Offline tab, open the drop-down menu for your meeting or event and click the "Contactless Sign In" menu link.

This will open a screen with a special link and QR code for participants to scan with their smartphone:

The contactless sign in screen is designed for a projector, flat screen display, or laptop at your registration table. You can also print it. Attendees can navigate to the short link or if they have an Android or Apple device, simply open their camera app and point their device at the screen:

Participants will be prompted to open the link in their web browser, where they will be guided through the sign in process.

The sign-in interface will collect the fields you have selected in your meeting menu under the Registration settings:

Note that you can request a number of items, and selectively require some or all fields.

*Custom fields: If you have the Public Input CRM 'Complete' plan, custom participant profile attributes will appear in this list. These fields can be added by your account manager upon request if you are a CRM customer on the Complete plan.

If you've chosen to enable speaker pre-registration, attendees will be presented with the option to sign up to speak in the meeting. If you set a non-zero limit to the number of speakers, this option will only show while there are available speaker slots remaining.

Here is an example of the form a participant sees as they sign-in to the meeting on their device:

Participants who register to speak using the standard meeting registration will appear in the Phone tab of the meeting admin section along with the approximate length of time they have been waiting to speak.

In-person attendees who sign in using the contactless sign in form will appear in the meeting participants list rather than the phone tab. At the time of this writing, you'll need to refresh the page to get the most up-to-date list, and we're hoping to provide a real-time option for in person speaker lists by February 2, 2021.

If you'd like to download or print the special contactless link and QR code, there's a special download option available. Here are instructions for accessing it.