New at Spektrix: Spring 2025

Resources:

• Resources

  • New at Spektrix page
  • Digital passes: How to deliver Tickets to Apple and Google Wallets
  • Spektrix Payments
  • Spektrix Partners
  • How to Cancel an Event: An emergency response guide for the arts

• Q&A

  Answers to a selection of the most frequently-asked questions from the event.  If you'd like to talk to us about anything else we've shared in this webinar, please get in touch.

   

  How can I add more detail to Digital Passes, such as instance location and seat attributes?

  You can find full guidance on Digital Pass design, including attributes specific to your venue, on the Support Centre.

   

  Would there be scope for digital passes to be used for membership cards in the future? 

  Not right away, but this is something we're exploring for the longer term - we know it's of interest to many users.

   

  It's sometimes isolating to think we're the only people having an issue, when that might not be the case or others might be struggling in silence. Any plans to facilitate collaboration between clients?

  Yes! We're actively working on plans to launch an Online Community before the end of this year. A Community Manager joins our team next week, and we're excited to share more plans in the next few months.

   

  How can I reach out to suggest a feature I'd love to see in Spektrix?

  Email any ideas to the team at support@spektrix.com, and give us an idea of how this would help you or your team. We keep track of every suggestion and use them to directly inform and influence our planning.

   

  How do you go about integrating with the Nimbus card scheme? 

  You can find more details about the Nimbus integration, and reach out to the Nimbus team to get set up, through our Partner Directory.

   

  With abandoned basket emails, will it be possible to check that there is still availability for that event before sending the email?

  Yes - we are working on a way to sync availability to Dotdigital to ensure you're only sending relevant events in abandoned basket emails and recommendations.

• Transcript

  - Welcome, everyone, to the New at Spektrix webinar. We're so glad to have you. I see our attendee count is continuing to rise, so we will wait just about one minute, and then we'll get started. But so glad to see so many of you here today, over 100 joining right on time, which is amazing. So with that, let us begin with the more exciting part of our afternoon. So welcome. My name is Mindy Barenblat, pronouns are she/her, and I'm based in Austin, Texas. My role at Spektrix is VP of User Enablement and Education. So this is our very first New at Spektrix event specifically for all of y'all in the UK. And yes, I did say y'all. Forgive me for that. But we're planning and hoping for this to be a regular thing. And at the end of this webinar, we will be asking for your feedback. So as you are listening and getting excited, think about what works, what doesn't work, what you wish we were talking about. All of that feedback is really helpful to us. We want to shape this event in a way that's helpful for you. So in brief, why are we here? We wanna talk to you about the really cool stuff that we've recently released and what's coming down the line. So personally, I am very excited about this because what this allows for is percolation and planning. If you have this knowledge proactively, it can rumble around in your brain. And as you're planning you might think, "Oh, you know what? I'm gonna wait for that automation to come out," or, "I'm gonna prioritize this because this change is coming or has just been released." So, excited for you and the impact and ease it brings to you, but, of course, also to your end customers. That's what it's all about. So on this call, we'll focus a lot on the improvements to the technology, but that's not all that we provide to you. We are your partner in more than just technology. So you'll hear improvements to our support, our resources, the network of partners that we offer. All of this value is what we'll be talking about today. So before we jump in, just a wee bit of Zoom housekeeping. So we're big fans of emojis. We want to know how you're feeling. If you do not see a react button at the bottom of your Zoom, never fear, just click the three little dots that say More and choose React. And then it will stay at the bottom. That's right, you're finding it. When you are in that three little dots, I would encourage you to also click on Q&A. So we will have a Q&A section at the end today, but I'll be honest, there's over 100 of you. We might not get to every single question. So as you're entering questions, please add your name and your organization. We will make sure every single one of your questions gets a response, even if it's not live today. So what is our agenda? What's the structure today? We're kicking off with Richard Bates, our director of product, who will share a bit about our approach to software development. Then we'll move on to what's ready now. This means you can just go start using this really cool stuff. So we'll start with digital passes for Apple and Google Wallet. This is one of our most requested features until February. Why February? Well, that's when it released. And many of you are already using this feature, and your patrons are really enjoying it. We've had really positive feedback. About 1/3 of you are using Spektrix Payments, and your customers particularly love Apple and Google Pay, with about 25% choosing that method of payment. Many of you are running with integrated solutions for merch and concessions, courses, camps, fundraising and more. We'll share some exciting success stories of how we meet these unique requirements. And then we'll take a quick look ahead to Spektrix Hubs. It's everyone's favorite time of the year, right after the snowman and the snow in December, obviously. And then we'll shift to our third section, which is what we're actively working on right now and what you can expect to see quite soon coming to you in your digital marketing through that combined power of Spektrix and Dotdigital. Finally, as I mentioned, we're closing out with that Q&A. If you didn't grab that button just yet, remember the three dots, click on it, grab Q&A, you can open that up and jot your questions with name and org as they come to you. So with that, I will hand over to Rich.
  
  - Thanks, Mindy, and yeah, thanks to everyone for attending today. As Mindy said, it's great to see so many people here on this call. So I've been part of the Spektrix team since 2012. Makes me feel very old. But in all those years, I don't think I've ever been more excited about the features we're delivering within a year as I am for this year. And there's a huge amount we've been working on, which is now possible, and even more that's coming. And we're gonna be covering lots of those features in today's session. So why am I excited about all of this? Well, from talking to lots of you and conversations I know lots of you had with people here at the Spektrix, with the Spektrix team, I know how useful the things we're working on is gonna be for you and your organizations and how much you're gonna love using them. But before I get into all of that, I just wanted to step back a little bit and talk to you about how been growing our software engineering team. So this chart shows the number of people working in the software engineering teams at Spektrix over the last few years. Now, as you can see, we've basically doubled the number of people working in this area over the period. Oh, if you just look back, Mindy, and we're now maintaining a team of about 80 people working full-time on software engineering. And this is all because we care deeply about delivering great software for this arts industry. And we can only do this with a well-staffed team of experienced experts, which is why we've really invested in growing our team in this way. And this year, we're really seeing the fruits of this strategy. However, it's also worth saying that actually only about half of our engineering teams are working on the sorts of features that we're talking about today or other features that you might see landing into your Spektrix system in the next year or so. The other half of our team are actually working on really important stuff behind the scenes. So they're working on ensuring that Spektrix keeps ahead of the curve of technological changes, remains a resilient secure system with a software architecture set up for long-term success. Now, this approach is uncommon. Lots of software companies generally, but also including within our own sector, don't invest in this way, and they look to save costs and cut corners, and they don't invest in that in that long-term way. Now, that cost-cutting approach does not work for us. It doesn't match our ambitions as a mission-led business to serve you all for the long-term. And frankly, if we took that approach and didn't invest in this way, we'd be falling short of the responsibility we have to this sector. But technology doesn't stand still. And so we believe it's important to be thinking ahead, investing in the future, and that's what this half our engineering team is working on, day in, day out. And this is because, you know, we want to be the leading provider for the sector, not just now, not just for the next few years, but really into perpetuity. But now back to the near term, and one imminent new feature we're working on that I'm really, really thrilled to share with you all today. And I feel I need a drum roll at this point 'cause this is the expansion of our offer limits to include per-customer-per-event instance limits, which is one of the most requested features we've had in the system. So as many of you know, our offers and features in Spektrix has this concept of limits. And these limits mean that an offer automatically stops applying whenever one of these limits are met. And at present, you can set this kind of limit, so a per-custom-per-event limit, and these work really, really well. But longer running shows, exhibitions, or other events that can have loads of specific dates and times that we call event instances, with these, it hasn't been possible to apply the offer limits in the same way. But this new feature that's coming will allow you to set these limits per customer per event instance in exactly the same way as you can already do with the other limits. So this will offer a smoother customer experience and loads of new opportunities, especially for organizations with long-running events, so things like discounts for customers who attend the same event or exhibition multiple times, annual passes or day entry for members or customers, especially useful for those of you who've got museums or galleries or visitor attractions, or discounts for things like classes and courses. So many of you have asked this improvement, and we're excited that it'll be possible this summer, but it's worth saying that all these limits work really smoothly for you setting up offers and for your customers booking online. You know, they automatically evaluate every offer in the system, all of the limits set with every update that a customer makes to their basket. But kind of because these limits are so seamless to use, they're actually deceptively tricky for us to code under the hood and make sure the system continues to perform well with every update to every basket that's going on all the time. So while this, you know, on this screen is just one new type of limit, it's actually one of the technically trickiest corners of code we worked on in Spektrix for a number of years, and that's only been possible thanks to that investment in our engineering team that I talked about a minute or two ago. So we're currently working on final tests of this feature and plan to have it available for you all to use later in the summer. So that's the first exciting new development for us to share on today's webinar. But there's loads more coming in this session from my colleagues on the call with us, and we're really looking forward to running more of these sessions in the coming months as well. So thanks, once again, for all being here. And now we're gonna hand back over to Mindy.
  
  - Thank you so much, Rich. I loved the explosion of emojis. This expansion of offer limits is a big deal for some of you, and for some of you, you're like, "Oh, okay, that's cool." But for some of you, this is a heart song. This gives you the flexibility to serve your customers and members in the best way possible, which is what we're all about. So we're not going to pause for questions right now, but never fear, Rich is sticking around. So again, pop those questions into Q&A as you have them. Before we look at some of the improvements that are running now, I actually am curious, did you know we have a new site that captures all of these new and upcoming improvements? So this is the New at Spektrix page. Give me a clap or emoji of your choice if you have already visited this page. Surprised if you haven't. So the link is in the chat. Highly recommend, please click that link, bookmark it, send it to family and friends. This is really exciting. Not only is it showing you here's new things that have launched that are ready now, but look at these other two buttons. What are we working on, and what are we exploring? We're lifting that curtain and kind of giving you a sneak peek into what those engineering teams are working on. In fact, if you go right now, you can see the offer limit feature that Rich was just chatting about. It's already there. It's on the Working On page. So bookmark this page. Visit it regularly. This is another resource that we've built for you. So if you have feedback on how we could make it better, please let us know, drop that into the chat, or just contact us later with your ideas. We really appreciate that. So what else is ready now, we're actually gonna start by talking about digital passes. And it's not that often that you get to hear directly from our engineering team, but today is your lucky day, my friends. I will hand over to Jade Walton, our senior product owner for the customer team, Jade.
  
  - Thank you, Mindy, and I'm super excited I get to talk to you all today about the magic of digital passes. This is the ability for your customers to add digital tickets directly to their device wallet from the ticket delivery email, also known as the print-at-home email, and sent from your Spektrix system. You have the ability to associate a single or multiple passes to different event instances for your organization. It's connected via our API, and all the data is fed from your Spektrix system. You can access a default template to use digital passes straight away without the need to design your own. Our simple and user-friendly pass designer means you can customize your digital passes to match your event level branding. And we offer this at no additional cost. In 2025, there's an expectation to have access to a digital ticket for streamlined entry into events. You want the ease of use for your customers as they can easily find their tickets in their device wallets. They're all in one place. There's no need to search through emails for tickets that have been purchased months in advance. We offer that flexibility to brand the past template. That branding, again, is customizable to match your organization's needs. We also leverage the event name, date and time of the instance in the print-at-home email, which allows smarter searching for those customers that still want to access the PDF. Now let's take a quick look at what that email could look like. Here we can see what the ticket delivery email could look like for your customers. You'll see the addition of Apple and Google Wallet buttons, but the PDF is still attached to the email. We can also see what a pass looks like on an Apple device in the wallet. And a really neat piece of functionality is the notification banner that appears up to two hours before the event is due to take place. You also have the ability to specify the name that appears on the banner, here The Green Playhouse. So let's have a look at the pass designer. Here on the screen, when you've logged in, you can see the passage you have configured for your organization. Looking in the pass designer, you can see there are multiple configurability options available for your digital passes and the types of data you can show on the front and the rear of a digital pass. You can customize the information that's displayed on a pass based on certain attributes in your Spektrix. There is also much more design options such as colors, configurations, and images. You can also preview how it looks on your Apple and Google wallet before you're ready to use it live. Now let's take a look at some live examples of digital passes our clients have configured. Some live client examples of passes for Apple and Google Wallets, as you can see, we have a variation of designs and logos. This shows the flexibility of our pass designer. Here is some of the feedback provided by clients who were early adopters of digital passes. As you can see, some key highlights are: positive receipt from customers, super simple pass designer, smooth and positive introduction. That's all for now on digital passes. Please post any questions in the Q&A, and thank you so much for listening.
  
  - Thank you, Jade. This is so exciting, and the feedback has been phenomenal already. All right, now I'll hand over to Mike Powell who's helping organizations explore the benefits of Spektrix Payments to share some of those success stories, Mike.
  
  - Thanks, Mindy, so I'm going to talk to you about what's new with Spektrix Payments and the impact that it's having for users who've already made the move. Now, if you've recently moved or if you are in the process of moving to Spektrix Payments, some of this might be familiar, but it's good to get a reminder of some of the features that you now have access to. And if you are not familiar with Spektrix Payments or you haven't explored it properly yet, I hope this will pique your interest. So Spektrix Payments is 1-year-old, and we're still very excited to be shouting about it. As Mindy mentioned, over 1/3 of our users have already made the switch. Spektrix Payments has allowed us to introduce functionality that otherwise wouldn't be available to us, like Apple and Google Pay. And there is more to come as we continue to build out features in ways that we just couldn't before. So as a quick reminder, Spektrix Payments is all about new technology that makes buying a ticket quick, easy, and simple, both for your returning customers, but crucially for that audience member of tomorrow who is buying a ticket from you for the very first time. Our selected payment provider who makes this possible is Adyen. They are a global provider based in the Netherlands, and they work with some very large organizations, processing millions of transactions a day. So this is how it works. Adyen replaces Opayo and your current acquiring bank. So this could be, for example, Worldpay or Barclays or Lloyd's. And what Spektrix Payments allows us to do is optimize your transactions and sets us up for future-proofing this payment technology. It also allows you to take advantage of Adyen's powerful features like their advanced fraud tools. So now onto the impact that we are seeing for Spektrix users who've already moved. So with Apple and Google Pay, customers can now use their digital wallets for payments as well as for the new digital passes that we've just heard about. For organizations that have made the move to Spektrix Payments, we are seeing, on average, one in four customers opting to pay with Apple and Google Pay where they have the option. And for some venues, we are seeing in excess of 40% of customers opting to pay that way. Let's quickly talk about some updates with Apple Pay. Now, Apple Pay wasn't available when Spektrix Payments first went live, but it is now, and it can be used on any browser. If a customer is looking to buy tickets on a Windows device or a device that isn't set up for Apple Pay, they don't need to find their card and type it in. They can scan a code in order to pay with that with Apple Pay on their iPhone, which is so cool. So if you are one of our early adopters, please contact support if you haven't turned Apple Pay on yet so that your customers can start using it. So with Spektrix Payments, we are also seeing more transactions going through successfully on the first attempt. So for most of our users not on Payments, we are seeing average payment approval rates in the high 80th percentile, and that's good. But with Spektrix Payments, we can see that rate reach 96.6% or even higher. Again, this reduces barriers for customers to be able to pay for their tickets on their first try with no fuss. The knock-on effect of that is that we are seeing fewer customer calls. So users like Stratford East have told us they are getting fewer customers calling for help with online transactions, which means they're freeing up more of their team's time. So some organizations, and you may be maybe one of them, they offer membership schemes where customers can choose to auto-renew that membership, or you might have recurring donations from your supporters. Now, these payments rely on stored cards which can expire. And when that happens, that prevents the recurring payments going through. Now, Adyen allowed cards to be automatically updated when they expire, and Adyen have told us that this can reduce unintentional churn on recurring payments by up to 30%, securing that revenue and retaining both members and donors. For finance teams who've moved to Spektrix Payments, the reconciliation process is now simpler, with reports coming through Spektrix and Adyen, and chargebacks can actually be easier to challenge and, depending on your current rates, they can be charged at a lower cost with Spektrix Payments than your current acquiring bank. So that's what we've seen for the users who've already made the move. But also, when you move to Spektrix Payments, we will provide you with new chip and pin readers free of charge. Now, some of you not on Spektrix Payments may have received an email from us over the past few weeks telling you that your pin pads will no longer be PCI-compliant from the 31st of May and you'll need to replace them. We still have time to bring you over onto Spektrix Payments and provide you with replacement pads for free before the May deadline. So reach out to support, and they can pass you to the Payments team, but do be quick about it. These new pin pads can be fully mobile, which makes it even easier for you to set up remote or additional box offices. And you can have team members roaming around the venue selling merchandise during intervals or taking donations during fundraising events. So what else can you get with Adyen and Spektrix working together? Adyen provides your team with a real-time view of the entire payment process, meaning you can give a better customer experience by resolving query transactions straight away and ensuring your customers get the tickets that they've already paid for. And just like with Dotdigital, Spektrix is providing this service so we become your frontline support for any issues and we will keep you informed about new features when they are released. So if you've been live with Spektrix Payments for a while, feel free to get in touch to make sure that you are making the most out of what we have to offer as we continue to make developments. And if you're not using Spektrix Payments yet, it's easy to make the move. We will take you through the whole process, which takes typically around 11 days, but we can move faster. If you get in touch, we will be happy to explain our costings, which will replace the transaction charges you are already paying to your acquiring bank. In many cases, we actually represent a saving. And if you're thinking of moving to Spektrix as your ticketing system, Payments will be available to you straight away, and we can set you up as part of your implementation. So thank you very much for listening. If you have any questions, please put them in the chat. Or if you would like to tell us about your experiences of Spektrix Payments so far, please share them with the Spektrix team.
  
  - Love all of the emojis that are coming in. It is so exciting to see the value that is already part of Payments, and reducing hurdles to receive payments makes your life easier and it makes your customers' lives easier, win-win. So now I will be handing over to Tom Nolan, our head of partner ecosystem, to share more successes from our clients, this time, exploring how organizations are using Spektrix alongside other software to meet specific needs like class bookings, merchandise shops, and more, Tom.
  
  - Thank you very much, Mindy. So to enable you to achieve your goals and optimize your operations, we have integrations with an ever-growing number of partners and we've built the system so that any other software developer can build an integration with Spektrix. This means you can choose best-in-class tools to meet your specific needs within your budget and have them all integrated with Spektrix. With all of these integrations, and what you can see here are just a few examples, data is being written back to Spektrix at the center. This data can then be used alongside all of the tools in Spektrix that you'll already be using, such as segmentation with customer lists, reporting, and email and ad automation using Dotdigital. Got some gentle audience participation at this point. So before I go on to talk about some of the most recent integrations that we have, I first wanted to hear from you all about the systems that you are using today that you would love to see integrated with Spektrix. So on the screen now you'll see a QR code. If you've got your phone at hand, you can scan that and respond to the question or click on the URL. That should have appeared in the chat there. I'm just gonna give that a few minutes. I know there's actually 200 of you on there, which is exciting and slightly terrifying. So I'm just gonna give that a moment for the count of participants in the Slido to go up a little bit and start to see what's happening there. So some interesting ones there. I think there's, yeah, some that we're familiar with, some that's less familiar. And just say, sort of, well, we're gonna go on to talk about some of the integrations that are covered here, but we'll also be using this to go and have a deeper look into and look at how we can best meet your needs there. Great, that's really interesting to see, and yeah, some of those things we've started to have conversations about internally already. So good to see that we're on the right track with some of that stuff. Great, Mindy, I think we'll go into the next section. So we've got an ever-growing number of different types of partners. To help you understand the range of options available, we've got a page on our websites, which you can see here, where you can meet our partners and explore the different types of products that you can plug into your Spektrix system. New partners are going live all of the time, and today, I want to call out a few of our newest integrations. For those of you who are currently offering education classes and courses as part of your program, we now have integrations with class registration platforms. Our class registration partners focus on providing smooth registrations for your customers, offering functionalities such as detailed attendee data capture, waivers, and payment plans. All of the data relating to the buyer will flow directly into Spektrix. So from the Spektrix customer record, you're gonna be able to see all of their interactions from class bookings to memberships, donations, and ticket purchases. And these class registration platforms can be set up quickly and start from 120 pounds a month. We've got a growing number of Spektrix users already making use of these integrated platforms. Green Box Arts in Colorado in the United States use an integrated class registration platform for their camps program, capturing granular data as is needed for these types of registrations with that bookers data logged centrally in Spektrix. And these integrations are quick to switch on, so even smaller teams, like those at Green Box Arts, can make use of these integrated products. For those of you who want to gain more of an insight into overall customer spend across all of your other purchase points, we have integrations with e-commerce platforms and point-of-sale systems to power your bars, restaurants, and gift shops. Our e-commerce and point-of-sale partners focus on providing the best online shop experience and in-person retail experience. And these integrations allow you to see all gift shop, food, and beverage purchases against a single customer record in Spektrix alongside all of the rich data that's already being held about the customer in your Spektrix system. There's a couple of these that I'm particularly excited about, which is Shopify and Square. We already know that lots of you are making use of these products already. Storyhouse in Chester make use of a point-of-sale integration with Tevalis to recognize members at the bar, trigger bespoke offers for these members and write all of the data back to Spektrix. As customers arrive at the bar, they present their digital membership card. The integrated point-of-sale system then checks the status of the customer's account in Spektrix and triggers the appropriate offer based on the level of membership that they hold. That spend and the detail of the items they've purchased is then written back to Spektrix, giving them even more insights into their members' behavior across all of their activity. So whereas before, they relied on assumptions of their members' behavior, they now have the data to inform their engagement strategies. And a number of organizations are using Shopify to power their online shop with all the data flowing back to Spektrix, giving them full insight into customers' purchase behavior across all of their sales points. V&A Dundee use Shopify for their online shop and can see, in Spektrix, how much customers are spending in the shop and the items they are purchasing and can use this data to identify potential members and high spenders. For those of you who are registered charities, we've recently built out integrations with even more fundraising tools. We are just finalizing an integration with iWave from Kindsight, which enables you to wealth-screen your current and potential donors based on criteria you specify in Spektrix, for example, customers that made their first booking yesterday or made a donation for the first time, and then have those wealth scores written back to the customer record in Spektrix. And that data can then be used in segmentation, can power specific donation asks, dynamic content and email campaigns, and generally refine your outreach. We've also got a new integration with the fundraising tool, Fundraise Up. This powers quick donation asks, prompting recurring giving and using AI tools to tweak the donation ask. All customers' transactions are written back to the record in Spektrix so you can see a customer's full giving history, however these gifts came in. We've also launched integrations with access tools to help you make your organizations as welcoming as possible to all. Nimbus Disability have integrated their Access Card with Spektrix. Customers with a Nimbus Access Card can link their Access Card details to their Spektrix account, or if it's their first time booking at the venue, it will create a new customer record for them. These requirements are pulled through automatically, powering access to specific inventory and offers, for example, a free companion ticket for those who are eligible. The Nimbus team handle the complexity of the accreditation process, ensuring that customers access the right provisions. And we're also working with Arts Council England as they integrate the all-in scheme with Spektrix. Bristol Old Vic wanted customers with access needs to be able to book their tickets as and when they wished. And the team noticed that lots of their customers had the Nimbus Access Card already, and so they were keen to integrate with it. They've been live now for just under a year and have had positive feedback from customers who especially like being able to self-serve and book their required inventory straight away without having to wait for box office opening hours. By making use of these sorts of integrated products, you build a deeper understanding of a customer's interactions with you. And here's what that can start to look like in Spektrix. From that initial account creation, which could come from a sign-up on your website, sign-up via your in-venue wifi, or from an interaction with an integrated platform like Square or Shopify. With sales process directly in Spektrix, you'll be identifying customers' ticket purchasing preferences based on their booking trends. And this can then all be supplemented by the data you collect through integrated registration platforms so you can gain visibility of their registrations through your education program, even though these are processed through a third-party platform. Through an integrated point-of-sale system, you can gain an understanding of their drinks preferences at the bar as well as accurate data on spend per head. And you get insights into their spend at your gift shop, easily spotting high-value spends. And all of this data can be used to power personalized communication both at the box office and across all your marketing communication channels. Using customer lists, you can segment using the data populated by integrated solutions. For example, a segment to include customers who've visited the bar this month and spent over 100 pounds. And use that alongside all of the other rich data you already have in Spektrix. So in this example, customers who have attended four or more events, spent over 100 pounds at the bar, and are not current membership holders. And that's how you can use best-in-class products alongside Spektrix to build even deeper relationships with your audiences. Thank you very much, and please do head over to our partner directory for more information about any of our integrated partners.
  
  - Thanks so much, Tom. Who's ready to go be recognized at the bar of Storyhouse in Chester and get a bespoke offer or maybe some of that beautiful jewelry from the V&A Dundee? So remember, add those questions into Q&A, and in the meantime, we'll close off our section for what's ready now with a sneak preview of Spektrix Hubs with the Brooke Gallagher.
  
  - Thanks, Mindy. Hi, everyone, I'm Brooke. My pronouns is she/her, and I head up the community and events team here at Spektrix. I'm here to just talk about Spektrix Hubs, which are our signature daylong events that are designed to enhance your use of the Spektrix system to create connections and empower you with the resources that you need to achieve your goals. We opened booking for the Hubs this year in March, and honestly, we've been absolutely gobsmacked by the amount of interest from all of you. So much interest, in fact, that we are actually currently operating waiting lists for all three of our allocations this year. Now, for those on the waiting list, we understand your eagerness to participate. We really wanna assure you that we're working hard to ensure that we have representation from as many organizations across our user network as possible. We know how important these connections and insights are. We're really looking forward to sharing an incredible program with you this year, including sessions from our teams that focus more on the Spektrix system and tools as well as talks from your peers in the sector, opportunities to meet with our client success specialists one-on-one, and the return of the Hubs workbook, which is modeled here by some of our lovely users. And that's to ensure that you can take all of the ideas back to the office with you if you do understand it can be tricky to maintain that momentum after the day. That's mainly all for me. I just wanna finish with a testimonial that we have from a 2024 Hubs attendee who shared this with us. I look forward to seeing so many of you there at Hubs this year, thanks.
  
  - Thanks, Brooke, the Hubs are such an extraordinary moment and always energizing and inspirational. So our final section before we get to Q&A is where we get a sneak peek at what we're working on right now with just a few features that we're releasing later this year. As ever, all of these improvements will appear in your Spektrix or Dotdigital systems automatically. You don't need to run any updates or pay anything extra to enjoy these benefits. And now to Ben Snell, our marketing automation solution lead.
  
  - Thank you, Mindy. Hi, I'm Ben. And it's my role at Spektrix to help our clients make the most of our integration with Dotdigital. And this year, we have lots of updates coming to this integration that will help you communicate with your audiences in new ways. One pain point that all our clients have or will encounter at some point is the need to make last-minute changes or cancellations to events. So our first new feature is giving you the ability to email audiences with need-to-know updates. Currently, essential updates about show changes are sent through Dotdigital as marketing emails. However, this means customers unsubscribed from marketing communications may miss out on essential information relating to changes or cancellations. We are introducing the ability to send service emails through Dotdigital, which are not subject to marketing preferences, to ensure that every customer receives crucial updates regardless of their opt-in status. You'll be able to design your own templates for updates like cancellations, venue changes, cast news, and trigger them from Spektrix. And if you wish, you could use the same functionality to deliver just-in-time e-tickets containing seat details, barcodes, digital wallet links, and more, reducing the opportunity for unauthorized ticket resales. It can be a stressful time when you need to cancel events and return refund tickets. So our next new feature is designed to make that a little easier. Right now, if an event's canceled, returns and refunds have to be manually processed one by one. Very soon, you'll be able to bulk return and refund a whole auditorium's worth of tickets with a single click. You'll decide whether to return commissions or other levies, and whether to send out order confirmation emails. And you'll receive a report flagging any cash transactions or other custom payment methods which need to be processed a different way. And finally, we've published guidance on how to cancel an event on our blog with an email template for your customers, step-by-step guides to assess risk and reaching a decision, and links to resources within Spektrix to help you out in an emergency. We'll send that link out in the post-event email. It may not be what you want to think about, but a little preparation could save a lot of pain when it does happen. The next set of updates we're bringing to our Dotdigital integration, we're all about unlocking advanced personalization. With advanced personalization, you'll be able to create campaigns that feel one-to-one, but at scale, tailoring messages, offers and experiences based on each customer's interests, actions, and preferences. And to achieve this, we're gonna be adding more data to our Dotdigital integration, as it's the additional data that will unlock advanced personalization. So for example, here we have an event in Spektrix which are gonna be syncing to products in Dotdigital. Here we have synced the name, image, and attributes. We've also brought across descriptions, dates, times, duration, and the event ID. We're applying this same approach to website data, pulling in web browsing data, cart data, and ticket sales, which is sinking to orders in Dotdigital. This additional data can be used when building campaigns, and it unlocks some exciting functionality. The best way to show you this with three examples, but please keep in mind what we're about to see is a work-in-progress. So right now, I've started building out my summer 2025 newsletter, and I'm ready to start adding events. That means manually going over to Spektrix and copying over details or going to another source and copying in from there. But now that my events are syncing over to the Dotdigital database, I can use the products block. If I drop this in, add products, I can add one of my events, and I'm gonna go ahead and add "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Already, you can see the images come across and the name. And I can choose the layout of this block. So currently, one big image. I could do image with text on the side and the fields of Spektrix that I want to sync. So right now, I've got the name, but the price come across zero. Price in Spektrix, kinda complicated 'cause you have price tables with many different ticket types and price bands, so instead of that, I'm gonna use an attribute. So right at the bottom here, I have a price-from attribute and some calculated dates for my first instance and last instance. Let's go for description as well. Perfect. And if I want to, I can reorder these. To make that nice and easy, if I just go back to layouts and fields again, it'll just pop all those fields at the top that I was moving around, and then I can reorder those. There we go. Now, if I want to, I can style this, so I can increase my font size, bold text as well to make sure it fits with my brand. Perfect, right now "Midsummer Night's Dream" is blue 'cause that's the link to my website. It's in fact using the web URL link from Spektrix, but I can instead show a button which I can change the text of and color to match my email. Perfect. There we go. Let's go ahead and do a couple more events. Remember, all this data is coming across with Spektrix automatically, so let's go and add two events this time. Let's go for Katherine Ryan, and another event I'm gonna go for, "Richard II." Perfect, and those events should appear side by side in my block. Again, I can change the layout. And if I want to, I can also reorder them by grabbing those blocks and moving them around. Again, I can choose my fields. I'm just gonna remove that price and add my description. And let's display a button, keeping it all on brand. And again, I can restyle this either by bolding the text or resizing them. So so far, I've added three events using static data brought across from Spektrix. But what if I wanted to tailor this email further by giving some bespoke events tailored to the recipient? Well, I could use the product recommendations tool inside Dotdigital. This is where using the data on sales we synced over, I can find best-sellers and advertise those; future events, the future events this customer hasn't booked with availability; lookalikes, which are events that similar customers as recipient have bought; most viewed on our website; trending, which is a combination of most viewed and bestsellers; and studio events, which is a custom one I've built off an attribute, so any event in my studio that's got availability in the future. And here I can decide on how the number of events I want to show and the layout. Let's go for three. And again, I can change the fields for this. And it's not gonna show any events right now because it's gonna populate those depending on who the recipient is. I can also, at any point, also choose the images. So I haven't got to use the images from Spektrix, I can resize them, or here I can override them. Let's quickly do our fonts. Perfect. Let's go ahead and preview this. And I think I have the start of a good-looking email for my summer season. I've got my main event. Again, all this information coming live from Spektrix and my other two events, and at the bottom, three events that are happening in my studio. There's all these buttons link out to the website, and there's three events are based on who this customer is. There's three events in my studio this particular recipient hasn't booked. Perfect, let me show you another email that we've been working on. This one is going to be an abandoned basket email. So abandoned basket emails are really good for capturing those customers who've got all the way through, they've looked at the prices, they've looked at the availability, they've gone all the way through to the basket but they just haven't converted. Let's try and win them back. And for this, in the Spektrix folder on the left-hand side, we've created a brand new block, our own block. Here is a wizard for the abandoned basket where I can choose the title, text, the body text including some personalization, the event name, description, and dates, and all that text can be customized at the top there. Let's go ahead and preview this for my default customer. And it's previewing for Tom Nolan who was trying to book for Jools Holland on the 30th of May. How about that? Button doesn't look quite right. I need to restyle that, which I can certainly do. Under utilities, I can go to the styles option here at the top. Paragraph styles allow me to change all my fonts, or the button one will allow me to reformat my button, so you still have control over how that looks. Again, I can go back to the wizard, change any of the text I've got in here that's coming through, or update my date format, for example. Let's preview that again. And it should have picked up my changes. Perfect. The date and the button changed. If I click the button, it uses that web URL, the same as the previous email. And here because there's only one instance, it's taken me straight to the seating plan so I can pick tickets. And if I go back, if I look at my customer record, I've been browsing for a different event, so I haven't quite booked "Richard II" yet, but I can finish my booking now. It'll take me to the event page 'cause there's multiple instances where I can choose. Just like the previous email we looked at, if I wanted to, I could add any of my product recommendations to this email to give the customer other options rather than just the thing that they abandoned in their cards. So the third email I want to look at is pre-show emails. Now, we pre-show emails already with event name, dates, and times pulled through automatically or even working on a new block that pulls for even more data. So using that product data we brought in, we've got venue, duration, format, for the dates, lots of different formats, and a supplementary event link. And let's have a preview of this. So our default customer's been, has got a booking for "Wuthering Heights," and automatically, the images come through. So right now that would mean having multiple pre-show email templates, but here the images come through automatically, the venue, so for anyone who's got multiple venues, dates and times, duration, link off to my supplementary events, and the ticket details. So I'm getting my ticket types, my seats, door attributes from the seat attributes, QR codes, and the Apple and Google wallet links. And if I click my supplementary event link, it's gonna take me directly to the correct supplementary page for the event the customer has booked for. You can see here, 13th of May for my VIP package. If I go back to my email, it's for the event on the 13th of May. Again, I could also add any of my product recommendations to the email if I wanted to. So that's just three of the exciting things that we've got coming up, and I can't wait to show you a lot more of them. I'm gonna hand now back over to Mindy for the Q&A.
  
  - Holy wow, right? Are you kidding me? Look at all of the smarts that are being built in to the marketing automation, the beautiful brand customizations. Really exciting stuff. And just for a moment before we jump into Q&A, I want you to just sit and think about, what are you most excited about having heard today? Like, I mean, obviously, we're very excited for all of it, but there's just so much that's ready right now and so much that is right around the corner. Though, as I mentioned before, there is literally over 200 of you. So with 10 minutes, we will not answer every single question, but we're gonna do a really good job, and I am going to put some of our amazing speakers in the hot seat. So this first one is for Jade from Eleanor. Apple, Google Wallet tickets, can you specify the location of the event, as we have two spaces in our venue, Jade?
  
  - Thanks, Mindy, so yes, you can use location on the pass details. You can also use event instance and seat level attributes to configure that data that pulls through from Spektrix.
  
  - Amazing, another one for digital passes. You're very popular, Jade. So wondering when the digital passes will have more detail, such as instance location and seat attributes. That one's from Claire.
  
  - So instance location is already available, and seat level attributes are already available. If you need any help with that or more information, I'm sure you can just reach out, give us a shout.
  
  - Great, and then B:Music in Birmingham loves the digital passes, uses seat attribute to allocate door numbers, which pull through to other types of tickets. Currently, we can't add the seat attributes to the digital passes, so are unable to use them. We have 16 doors, so it's pretty critical information. Can you speak to that? Maybe extra fields? Yeah, sorry Jade.
  
  - Yeah, no sorry. Sorry, Mindy. So yeah, I think the seat attributes should be available in digital passes, but, like, happy to reach out to Kira at B:Music and we can see what's going on there and why it's not working.
  
  - Amazing, always good when the engineer is right there and ready to jump in, if anyone can solve it, right? So Derby Live, the New at Spektrix page is great movement forward, still miss the old feature suggestion forum where other users could add a vote to suggestion and have dialogue about issues. It's sometimes isolating to feel like you're the only one. I get that. It might not be the case many people could be struggling about this topic. Any plans to facilitate collaboration between clients? Brooke, can you speak to this one?
  
  - Great, thank you, Mindy. Thanks, Jenny. Really good question at a very exciting time. I think we are able to share with you that we've actually just hired a community manager and we are in the very, very early, early stages of thinking about how we're gonna build an online community for all of our users. So very, very early stages. But yes, we want to make it much easier, much slicker, much quicker for all of you to talk to one another. So do watch this space. It's a very exciting time. Again, it's a probably sort of a, it's a mid to longer term project 'cause we want to do the best job for all of you, but if anyone's particularly interested in getting involved super early and helping us out when we are building a bit of a trial for it, just get in touch with us through whichever channel is easiest for you, and we can have a chat to you about that.
  
  - Love that so much, Brooke. We want to extend all of that connectivity and inspirational goodness beyond Hubs so that you have access to each other and to ideas and to sharing all the time. That's the goal. Y'all are an incredible group of users, and we know that if you can rely on each other, you'll be able to even amplify your impact even more. So really excited for this. The next one is actually for Tom, a question about all the integrations. Are these native or through Zapier?
  
  - Thanks, Mindy, so actually depends on which product you are interested in. Some of them are through Zapier, and some of them are directly integrated via our API. So for example, the Shopify one is via Zapier, but we've made that process as easy as possible for you all. So we've built out what we call templates in Zapier, so you don't have to get involved in building that all out in Zapier. It's just a case of sort of hooking up your Spektrix system to your Zapier account, and we're here to support with that process to make it as smooth as possible.
  
  - Smooth as silk. That's what I like to hear, Tom. Thank you. Next one is for Ben. I am not surprised, just based on sheer number of emojis, that there is a question of, when will these Dotdigital updates be available? I want them now, I want them now, I want them now, is, I'm assuming, the subtext.
  
  - That's a really good question. In fact, we have begun some very small scale testing of the basket abandonment emails. We've got a few clients out there that have been testing it for us. So if it's one of you, thank you very much. So that, hopefully, is not too far away in the next couple of months. And then the rest of those updates we looked at, we are looking at, again, testing in July, August with a bigger rollout in September. We'll hopefully be in touch with all that very soon.
  
  - Grand. All right. I've got a question for Rich. Let's see, hmm, is there scope for digital passes to be used for membership cards in the future?
  
  - Thanks, yeah, really good question, and definitely scope in the future. It's not something we're working on right now, so we don't have like a definite timeline, but we've asked it a few times already, and it's definitely on our radar. So hopefully a later point this year, maybe the next time we're doing this webinar, we'll be able to share that with you, but yeah, watch this space some more.
  
  - Rich, don't go on mute yet. You're still in the hot seat. So do we have to reconfigure our readers to read QR codes? They currently read the barcodes.
  
  - After the digital passes. So yeah, the good news here is that if you're using the e-tickets that go deliver as PDF or using the digital passes functionality that Jade was showing, whether it's a barcode or a QR code, it all links back to exactly the same ticket and the existing scanning hardware that you will already have. If you do scan PDF e-tickets, we'll scan them equally the same. So regardless of whether it's a paper printout, whether it's a PDF on a phone, or whether it's a digital pass, all the same hardware all linking back to the same ticket in Spektrix.
  
  - Amazing news. Thank you. Mike, I've got one for payments for you. So can bookers use Apple, Google Pay in any, all browsers?
  
  - Great question, okay, so let's talk about on your phone or on your mobile device first where you have Apple Pay or Google Pay set up. So with Google Pay, yes, any browser, no problems at all. With Apple Pay, Apple say you should be really using Safari. However, we've tested it internally. I literally just tested it about 10 minutes ago, and it did work for me on Firefox, and it'll also work on Google Chrome. So yes, it should work on all devices. If you are using a device where you don't have Apple or Google Pay set up, with Apple Pay, that's where you can use the code. So you would scan it on your laptop, you'd scan it with your phone, and then you would be able to pay with Apple Pay on your phone.
  
  - Amazing, love it when functionality is actually better than advertised, good stuff. Ben, since service emails are coming, will it be possible to use Dotdigital to build our confirmation emails?
  
  - Not yet, this is not part of what we're working on right now. We're working on just the service information emails for one-off emails. However, we do know it's a much requested feature. So something that we plan to look at and go through discovery on later on. However, it's not just the order confirmation email. We could look at all of the service emails that go from Spektrix directly. However, last year, we actually did update the default templates for our service emails. So if you haven't had a look at that, go to our support center and have a look 'cause we've got brand new templates you can download, which are really easy to customize, the colors, add your logos and change. So you do can check those out in the meantime.
  
  - Excellent. I think we have time for one more question. Remember, no tears. If your question isn't answered live, just make sure that you submitted it with your name and organization so that we can get back to you. And if you aren't sure or you think you might've forgotten, feel free to resubmit the question. So our last question today is for Mike. What's the changeover like to swap members over to the new sort code and account number method? Is there a manual process to reach out to each renewal member in the system? We're currently setting up Adyen in order to do the finish to Spektrix Payments.
  
  - So I'm assuming this is talking about Adyen's ability to automatically update cards. So the way this works is, actually, it's still stored against a card. The recurring payment is stored against a card. Adyen just has the ability to update a card's details when a card expires. And it depends on the number of recurring payments that you have when you're moving over to Spektrix Payments. If you've got loads, we do have a way of doing a migration. If you only have a few members that might be signed up for recurring payments, then actually it's a really good opportunity to reach out to those members, ask them to sign up again, put in their new card details, but it's also a really good touch point.
  
  - Perfect. Thank you, Mike. So we have run out of time. Thank you for staying to the end. Thank you for joining us today. We know your time is precious, and we want to value that. We want you to be walking away with lots of ideas and inspiration and questions. Keep the questions coming. You know you can always contact us in whatever way is easiest for you. Don't forget to bookmark that New at Spektrix page. You definitely wanna keep abreast of all that's happening and what's shifting from working-on to ready-now. Watch out for communications after this. We'll be sending you all of the critical links and some additional resources. And last, but very much not least, your feedback on this webinar. As soon as you close this window, a screen will pop up with the joyful opportunity to let us know how much you loved it or what you wish were different. Please, please, please, it's only three questions. We know you can do this for us, and it helps us shape the event. So thank you again. We are so excited for what this means for you and for your customers. We are here for you. Have a wonderful day. Thanks again. And ciao for now, my friends.