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How to Create an Event Wailist: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1659924
Do you have a super popular event that sold out, but you're still experiencing high demand for it? In cases like these, you may wish to create a waitlist to collect information for patrons who are interested in the event so that you can contact them if space frees up or if you decide to repeat the event.
You can create a waitlist in PatronManager by creating a special waitlist event in your Event Inventory! This will allow you to capture patron contact information, along with how many tickets they want.
In this article, we'll walk you through:
- Creating a waitlist event in PatronManager
- Some tips to distinguish your waitlist event from a regular event
- Reporting tips for your waitlist event
- Some considerations for your waitlist event
Ready? Let's get started!
How do I create a waitlist event?
To create a waitlist event, you'll create a new General Admission event with these steps.
If you don't want patrons to pay to join your waitlist, make sure to set a single Price Level at $0.00. This will allow patrons to join the waitlist via your Public Ticketing Site (PTS) without paying money.
Alternatively, you could use a Google Form instead of a waitlist event, but note that this means that patron information won't be in PatronManager.
How can I set my waitlist event apart from my regular events?
There are several ways to help distinguish your waitlist event from your regular events to prevent confusion. Some suggestions are:
If you clearly name your Ticketable Event and Event Instance, you can help both your staff and your patrons online to immediately recognize that this event is a waitlist, and not for real tickets.
In the example above, the Ticketable Event is named "WAITLIST: The Batman Musical" and the Event Instance is named "The Batman Musical Waitlist," but you can also create your own clear naming conventions for waitlist events.
Since the names of your Ticket Allocations and Price Levels are also visible to patrons on the PTS, we recommend clearly naming your Ticket Allocations and Price Levels too, to avoid confusing patrons.
Description and Detail text for your Ticketable Event and Detail text for your Event Instance will appear on your PTS. Adding text to these fields to clarify that this event is a waitlist only will help your patrons to easily distinguish this waitlist from actual events.
For more on where these text fields appear on your PTS, check out our guide!
By making the Sort Order of your waitlist Ticketable Event something higher than your other events currently on sale, you can ensure that your waitlist event appears below your others events on the PTS.
To help direct interested patrons to your waitlist, consider putting a link to your waitlist event in the "Sold Out" Message field on your original Ticketable Event.
After patrons purchase tickets on your PTS or from you at the box office, they'll receive an Order Confirmation Email. To help clarify that this is a waitlist, consider creating a custom Order Confirmation Email for your waitlist Ticketable Event.
If you normally allow patrons to receive Print-at-Home tickets via email, consider not allowing Email as a Supported Delivery Method for your waitlist Ticketable Event.
This will ensure that patrons won't receive any sort of ticket, which could be confusing.
If you use Automated Communications to send Pre- and Post-Show Emails to your patrons, make sure to exclude your waitlist Ticketable Event from Automated Communications.
Do you create a lot of waitlist events, or do you anticipate doing so in the future? If so, it may be useful to add an Event Category for your waitlist Ticketable Events.
As a bonus, with this, you could also let waitlists be a category option on the PTS for patrons to search for!
How do I report on my waitlist?
Because this waitlist is built as a Ticketable Event in your Event Inventory, you have the same reporting options for this waitlist as you do for other events!
For example:
- Need a list of all patrons on your waitlist? Use the Door List
- Want to quickly run a report to contact patrons on the waitlist for a campaign? Use a CRM Snapshot
For more about reporting or to get started with reporting, check out our documentation here!
Other things to consider with a waitlist event
With a waitlist event, there are some other things to consider. We'll cover some considerations here to guide you.
If space does open up for your actual event, you can move patrons from your waitlist event into the actual event by exchanging their waitlist tickets for real tickets with the exchange process!
During the exchange process, you'll be able to charge the patron the difference for the real tickets, and you'll have the option to send them an Exchange Confirmation to confirm their new tickets.
Cancellation Emails, part of Automated Communications in PatronManager, allow you to easily get in contact with all patrons for an event, regardless of their Email Status.
If you need to reach out to all patrons on your waitlist at once, like if you decide to add an additional instance for the event, you can let all of your waitlist patrons know by sending a Cancellation Email!
After your event has passed, if you run reports for marketing lists, you'll probably want to exclude the patrons from your waitlist event from these reports. This will help you avoid sending marketing communications to them that refer to an event they never attended.
To do this, you'll want to either add a filter to your reports to filter our your waitlist event by Ticketable Event Name or Event Instance Name, or if you use CRM Snapshots you'll want to make sure that you don't select your waitlist Ticketable Event or Event Instance for your reporting criteria.