At the Summit you’ll see PASS announce the total attendance and the “total registrations”. The total registrations is the sum of the conference attendees and the pre-conference registrations. A single person can be counted three times (conference plus two pre-cons) in the total registration count.
When I was doing marketing for the Summit this drove me nuts. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would use total registrations. However, when I tried to stop reporting this number I got lots of pushback. Apparently this is how conferences compare themselves to each other. Vendors, sponsors and Microsoft all wanted to know our total registration number. I was even asked why we weren’t doing more “things” that people could register for so that our number would be even larger. This drove me nuts.
I understand that many of you are very detail oriented. I just want to make sure you understand what numbers you’re seeing when we include them in the keynote at the Summit.