How to Set Up a Ticket Event

We are pleased to roll out a number of new features for nonprofits, which are releasing publicly in July. Customers who are part of the Early Adopter program for these features will get to try them out as early as this week, beginning with the new ticket event platform for nonprofits. As with our race registration platform, setting up your ticket event is simple with our five step wizard once you have access to the Nonprofit Dashboard. To create a new ticket event, use the direct link, or from the Nonprofit Dashboard, choose “Create New Ticket Event.”

Step 1 – Basic Info

This is where you set up the basic information that will appear on your front page:

• Event name
• Event description
• Contact information- this will not be publicly displayed, but it will receive forwarded messages from people using the event page’s “contact” box
• Location information (optional) and time zone
• Visibility – draft, private or public. You will be the only one who can access your draft event if you choose that option. If you choose “private,” the event will be published once complete, but will only be accessible to people with the link. Public events are available to everyone.                                                      

Step 2 – Ticket Groups and Ticket Levels

Your nonprofit event can easily support a single ticket type, or many ticket types over multiple times and days. We have introduced a new concept called “Ticket Groups” that allow you to group one or more “Ticket Levels” together:

For a simple ticket event, you would define one Ticket Group and one Ticket Level. This provides some nice formatting and display possibilities even for a single ticket. It becomes very powerful when there are multiple ticket groups and levels.

In the following example, we have created four Ticket Groups in the wizard:

If we click on the edit icon for the May Screening, we can set the Ticket Group name, description, time, and date. These will appear on the front page of your event website:

You can also have just one ticket group.

Once you have defined your ticket group, then you can define your ticket levels. Ticket levels are used to create different options or prices. In the Movie Screening example, we have a ticket with snacks and a ticket by itself. In the Garden Tour example, there are ticket levels for general admission, kids’ general admission, and Garden Club members. These can be priced differently; pricing occurs in a separate step.

Here is another example: you might be selling tickets for a golf outing fundraiser. You might have three ticket groups – Saturday Morning Golf, Saturday Afternoon Golf, and Dinner. Within the Saturday Morning Golf ticket group, you could make tee times every 10 minutes as ticket levels. Additionally, the setting for requiring purchase of tickets in multiples of one could be changed to multiples of two, forcing a person to buy two tickets or four tickets together. So when they click on the + button, it increases by units of two and will not accept one or three. In the next step, we will see how to price tickets, and how to set limits on the number of tickets available within a ticket group or a ticket level.

Step 3 – Purchase

The Purchase step allows you to define the specifics of purchasing tickets:

• Pricing
• Information collection
• Ticket quantity caps
• Waiver
• Purchase display

There are several options for ticket pricing. You can easily set:

• Multiple pricing periods, so you can have price increases as the event date gets closer.
• Pricing based on quantity. For example, you could make tickets drop in price from $20 per ticket to $18 per ticket once 5 or more are purchased together. This encourages people to buy more tickets.
• Separate pricing for ticket levels. In this example, it is $20 for adults and $8 for kids.

Registrant information collection can also be customized. We require first name, last name, and email address. You can show or require fields as needed. Setting the password field to “required” means that an account will be generated. If you don’t make a password required, registrants will still be able to go back to the event website and resend their tickets if needed.

The other fields may be applicable to some events, but not all. For example, if you are hosting a national event, it might be useful to collect the zip code or city information from your registrants, so you know where to target marketing for next year. Or it may be important to collect phone numbers in case you need to contact people on the day of the event.

You may also want to collect information from each ticket holder (so if someone buys four tickets for four people, you require them to fill out information for each person).

This could be important if you are holding an event for which you need to know which attendees are minors, or which are from out-of-state.

Note that you will not be able to collect the email addresses of minors.

Registration caps can also be very powerful. In this example, it would prevent the sale of more than 100 tickets overall.

Additionally, there are even more powerful caps that can be set across ticket levels. For example, if you are hosting a charity golf outing, you might only want a maximum of 12 registrants for your first hour of tee times. You can select four tee times and cap them at four people, allowing your registrants more time slot options (since there will be 16 total spaces) while ensuring that you will not exceed your maximum of 12 players.

Or, for the Garden Tour example, you may want to limit the number of tickets available for the Garden Club Members and General Admission: Children ticket levels, in order to ensure that people buy the more expensive General Admission tickets. So you can set a cap:

You can do the same thing with Ticket Groups. 

You are able to customize how ticket groups and ticket levels are shown on your event’s front page. If you want your ticket groups to be selected as the first step in registration, then check the first box. It will look like this, with all the ticket groups laid out, but without showing ticket levels.

In order to register, your registrants choose their ticket group first, and are then sent to the page where they select the ticket level (in this golf outing example, this is the tee time) and the number of tickets.

If you have a large number of ticket groups, this method prevents a cluttered front page.

However, if you have only a couple of ticket groups, you may want to allow registration directly from your front page, which means that registrants can select their ticket levels and their desired number of tickets right away. This can be done through Waiver and Other Registration Settings in the third step of the wizard. Registration on the front page looks like this:

After selecting their desired number of tickets, the registrants click “Sign Up” and go to the next page. If you require any information from them besides name, email, and password, they first fill out the information on a page like this:

Then they are directed to the payment page, where they pay and confirm.

Step 4 – Payment

This step of the wizard simply asks how you want the processing fees from your ticket event to be charged.

You can have a different preference for each of the three columns here. Note that unlike with RunSignup races, there is not currently an option for the donor to choose whether or not to pay the processing fees.

In order to receive your payments, you must choose a Payment Account. If you have created a race on RunSignup before, you should already have one. If not, you will need to create one. 

Finally, you can customize what participants will see on their credit card statement with the Dynamic Descriptor. In this example, they will see a charge from “MovieScreeningBLP.” You can change this to whatever you want; you may choose to make it the name of your nonprofit.

Step 5 – Finish

This step leads you to a page where you choose either to go to the event dashboard or view the event website. The dashboard is where you can view reports, set up donations, upload a banner image, set theme colors, and manage other settings. 

Read more about our new RunSignup for Nonprofits technology:

The Early Adopter Program

Overview

Ticket Event Reports and Management

Advanced Features of Ticket Events

Donations

Nonprofit Dashboard