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Your guide to running a touchless event gate (a digital experience)!
"Since initially using Purplepass, we have transitioned even more events to this system. This has dramatically improved the customer experience. Purplepass allows our students to quickly see in realtime what tickets are available, what the view from the seat looks like, and the cost for the tickets. It has also simplified the process from something that involved dozens of people and multiple departments to prepare for ..."
- Pensacola Christian College
"...our lives, in the area of ticketing, is so much easier now that we've been dealing with Purplepass...the ability to have and scan paper tickets has greatly increased our efficiency at the box office. We've almost got our audience trained completely at this point!”
- Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School
Excite Fundraising is bringing digital ticketing to schools through their partnership with Purplepass; an all-in-one event management and ticketing software with 12+ years of industry experience.
Purplepass is built for massive events and multi-day festivals, but also supports personal events such as performances, schools and sports. Their ticket registration is robustly built to support a large attendance, but don't worry. . .onboarding and training couldn’t be easier.
Today, thousands of event organizers and venues around the country of all sizes are taking advantage of Purplepass’ streamlined digital ticketing technology!
How to build an online student registration with Purplepass
S T I L L H A V E A Q U E S T I O N ?
Schedule a consultation call with one of our representatives by filling out the request form.
FREE RESOURCES FOR SCHOOLS
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"As our ticket booth lines begin to form, we've noticed a trend of customers jumping on their phones and purchasing tickets. Immediately, they get out of the ticket booth line and into the entrance line. Again, speeding up our admission and keeping lines down. “
- Olympia School District
"They allowed us, as the school, to set up ticketing for our sporting events. Purplepass employees seem to be always available to help...Purplepass made sure we were able to achieve sales the way that was needed, i.e. Season Ticket Sales for sports."
- Wylie ISD Athletics
Purplepass has a unique option where you can upload a “Code list” which is a spreadsheet filled with information such as names, emails, ID numbers, or anything you’d like. You will be able to assign this list to any event where each code can give access or discounts to any ticket type that you’d like.
You can limit the code to one purchase per order and even limit how many tickets they can get.
You can password protect your event so early access people only need to use a single password to enter the sales. If you choose to password protect an event, you can use multiple passwords that you can easily program in. When the event is password protected, it will not allow access into the event page itself.
You can also provide a unique code (coupon codes) users can use to receive an early bird discount at checkout.
You can have multiple pricing levels. You have the capability to create as many ticket types are you need and name them all something different. If you have assigned seating, you will also be able to have different price points for one seat. For example you will be able to offer both student pricing and adult pricing for a single seat.
Purplepass understands that concessions may seem like a separate part to your daily sales for your school’s sport, but the software makes it easy to have it all under one roof. All you would be doing is adding another ticket type and using the “Non-inventory” option so it won’t count against the venue’s capacity. Don’t worry, you can still set a max amount available for a single item in case there is limited supply.
You will have two main ways for purchasing tickets – (1) Direct everyone to your main Purplepass page with all of your events or you can (2) embed the buying process directly on the school’s website using ticket widgets.
The widgets require no special skills to install. You just copy and paste a few lines of code into your website and you are done. There are 3 different widgets to choose from to sell from your own website. A single event widget, a calendar widget, and a listing widget. You will be able to use multiple widgets on a single website page if you’d like and they will all put your customer’s tickets into one cart. When they are all done purchasing, they will be back on your own website!
Purplepass has a few options for season passes. You can create a pass with as many tickets as you’d like in them from as many games as you’d like. For example, you can create a pass with all 10 home games that you have during a season and offer 1 ticket to each. When the customer purchases this, they will receive 10 tickets in their confirmation email.
Our other pass type is called a Flex Pass. This allows you to add all 10 home games to the pass and you can allow the customer to choose a fixed number of games in any configuration. For example, they can select 4 games out of the 10. This is great for people with busy schedules that want to come to a few games that they know they have time for.
The options available for a flex pass:
Allow customers to choose any X number of events defined below:
- Allow the customer to choose the same event more than once for their flex pass
- Show date and time of each event to customer when selecting the flex pass
- Show ticket type of each event to customer when selecting the flex pass
Purplepass will build out your maps for you at no charge. You will have access to alter or create new maps any time you want. All maps are interactive where the customer will be able to select their own seats. If there are different pricing levels for that seat, they will be displayed immediately for selection.
Renting, lease, buy and possibly comp depending on volume. Please see our page about all our equipment. Our equipment ranges from a free scanning app to completely self-sufficient wireless devices that run off their own cellular. We even have complete setups for a more stationary box office solution. You will be able to rent, lease, buy and we may possibly be able to offer items at no cost depending on volume.
If you have all your information ready, you can get a single event setup and start selling within 20 minutes. After that, if your events are similar with a change in date and opposing team, there is a copy function that will make quick work out of producing an entire season. You will also have a 1 on 1 client rep that you will reach out should questions pop up.
For schools there are a few ways to go about pricing.
Pass on the fee (default method)
You can pass on the fee to your customers. Purplepass' discounted rate for schools is 2% + $0.99 a ticket. We do understand that many schools charge a low admission price. While this price makes sense for anything above $10-$15, below that it may seem an expensive addon. Next is an alternative solution.
Absorb the fee
You may absorb the fee. This will only charge the customer a solid amount with no extra costs to them. It will charge you as the event organizer. However, to counter this, many people will make the overall cost of the ticket higher. In most cases, customers don’t seem to mind paying a little more if it’s just the face value that they pay for.
Purplepass Ticketing License
This is a once a year fee that the school pays directly. This will allow you to charge the customer for only the face value without having to worry about other fees. The pricing works out to about 25-50 cents per ticket, depending on your volume. You will have options to charge a small fee to the customer, like our default method, that you would keep helping recoup or completely pay for the license fee.
The CARES Act and pending legislation in Congress may provide an opportunity to have the Federal Government cover the cost of your digital ticketing system.
Funds are going to be provided to schools to help them reopen safely. Having a touchless digital ticketing system for your athletic programs is key to safely reopening. You can discuss this further with your finance department to explore possibilities within your school district and states.
O T H E R F E A T U R E S Y O U M A Y B E I N T E R E S T E D I N
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M Y E V E N T S & C R E A T I N G A N E V E N T P A G E
Email customers tool
New marketing opportunities using a built-in emailing system to send and schedule announcements.
SMS marketing
Built-in SMS marketing tool for sending text alerts, announcements, season pass renewals, sponsorships, etc.
Sponsorship opportunities
Potential sponsorship opportunities via digital tickets graphics, the sales page, email receipts, branded emails and SMS marketing alerts.
Live-streaming
Live-streaming solutions (Currently in development) to allow people to pay for access to virtual events and live streaming at home.
1. How do I offer my students a discount and/or free tickets they can redeem online?
2. What kind of support do you offer?
Purplepass offers 24/7/365 phone and email support for both you and your fans. You also will have access to live chat support and two dedicated one-on-one reps who understand your school, know your setup, and can help you right away.
3. How does this help me deal with Covid-19 protocols?
One of the major objections of an all-digital contactless ticketing system is to prevent the possible spread of the virus. By eliminating the physical exchange of money via cash or credit and by reducing or eliminating the use of physical paper tickets, your fans will be able to safely buy their tickets online, get scanned at the door, and enter the event, all with no physical interaction.
This reduces the chance of spreading the virus and therefore will be critical in safely reopening your athletic programs.
4. How will our fans know to use this service?
The actual purchasing process will be simple. Fans will use their computer or phone to go online, pick their tickets, pay for them, and download their digital ticket(s). The checkout process is quick and streamlined, making it easy to purchase tickets on your phone even if you are standing at the entrance gate in line waiting to get in. The biggest question asked is how will our fans know where to go to purchase tickets.
You can either promote the ticket buying link that goes to Purplepass or you can add the ticket widget to the school’s website, which allows fans to easily find and purchase tickets directly from your own site. This is the most common way schools do it as it’s extremely easy to install, user friendly and great for the branding experience.
5. Can I offer early access tickets for our season pass renewals?
6. Am I able to have different pricing for one event? (Student, Adult, Senior pricing)
7. Am I able to sell concessions and school merchandise alongside a game day ticket?
8. Where will our parents, students and fans go to buy tickets?
9. What do you offer in regards to Season Passes?
10. We need assigned seating. Do you offer that?
11. What type of admission equipment do we offer for the event gate?
12. How quick can we get events posted and selling?
13. Are we still able to use our traditional tickets along with the new digital tickets?
Yes, there is no problem at all using traditional tickets. It is even possible to barcode your traditional tickets so those scan in just like the digital tickets. Your Purplepass representative will go through the options with you and help figure out the best solution for your school.
14. Pricing and fees
When do I get paid?
If Purplepass is handling the credit card processing, then you will be paid the Thursday after your event via eCheck, traditional paper check, or ACH direct deposit.
If you have your own merchant account, you can link it up with your Purplepass account so all monies go directly to you as tickets are sold.
15. What is the CARES Act and can it help with the cost?
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Credit card fees
Please keep in mind that any time there is a credit card transaction, the merchant provider will charge us or you for the service to process the card. When you first create your account with us, we provide the merchant account by default. Our fee for online transactions (card not present) is 3% of the transaction amount. For in person credit card transactions (card present) through our box office software, the fee is 2.5% + $0.25 a transaction. You do have the option to use your own Paypal account to accept payment or your own merchant provider using Authorize.net as the payment gateway. If you have high volume throughout the year, we always recommend using your own merchant account since you may be able to get a better rate than what we offer.
Digital ticketing
