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

  Our answers to a selection of your questions. If you'd like to talk to us about anything else we've shared in this webinar, please get in touch.
  
  
  

  Can I scan the pdf of Print At Home tickets just the same as I can with digital passes? Will I need specific scanners?

  Yes! You can scan PDF tickets, digital passes, and tickets printed at your box office in the same way, all using your existing scanners.
  
  

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

  Email any ideas to us with 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.

   

  Is there a timeline of when the integration with donor prospect research platform iWave is expected to be available?

  We're making good progress and hope to have this working later this month. We'll keep you informed!

   

  How can I find out how much integrated solutions cost? Is there an additional cost to use Zapier or API integrations? Or are there discounted rates for Spektrix users?

  We don't charge any extra for integrations using the Spektrix API. Zapier charges based on your usage - you'll need the 'professional' level plan to integrate with Spektrix, but discounts are available for non-profits.
  To understand the costs associated with specific partner products, it's best to reach out directly to them, or speak to us if you need advice. We encourage partners to provide an indication of pricing on their listings within the Partner Directory, and we're making plans to improve that visibility this year.

   

  We're already live with Spektrix Payments and have a few Chip & PIN terminals live. How can we get more?

  Just email us and we'll sort this out for you - Chip & PIN terminals are provided at no additional cost for Spektrix Payments users.

   

  When you introduce the new functionality to email audiences with 'need to know' updates, what will happen if someone unsubscribes from Dotdigital through the Dotdigital side?

  Unsubscribing from Dotdigital marketing emails, in Spektrix or Dotdigital, would not stop the new Service emails as they use a different part of Dotdigital. In fact these new emails will not have an option for customers to unsubscribe, as they are classified as essential service communications and should not contain any marketing material. 

   

  Is there a selected theme for Hubs 2025 yet?

  Yes! The theme this year is 'Transform Your Audience Experience' - helping you transform the way you engage with your customers, your team, and the Spektrix solution. Registration opens in May 2025.

• Transcript

  Welcome everyone. My name is Mindy Barenblat. My pronouns are she, her and I'm based in Austin, Texas. My role at Spektrix is VP of User Enablement and Education, and this is our very first new at Spektrix event. We hope it will be a regular thing. There'll be an opportunity for feedback at the end, so please do tell us what works, what doesn't, what else you'd like to see. This is your event, so help us shape it. In brief, we're here to tell you the really cool stuff we've recently released and what's coming super soon. I'm particularly excited for this event because it gives space for all of us to percolate and to plan.

  By making sure you have this knowledge proactively, you can let it rumble around. You might decide to do some things now or wait for a new feature or an automation that's just around the corner. On this call, a lot of the focus will be on improvements to the Spektrix system, but of course our offer to you is more than just technology. We'll also highlight improvements to our support and training offers, our resources, our networks so that you can get the best possible value from our partnership.

  Just a wee bit of Zoom housekeeping, at certain points, we might ask you to share emojis. I've seen a couple already, so thank you. If you're not seeing it in Zoom, it's going to be along the bottom bar. If you don't see it, there's a little button that has three dots and says more. Look for the react option. You're finding it, you're winning, friends. While you're under that more, there's also the Q&A option, so we are going to capture questions throughout the session and then do Q&A at the end. I'll remind you a couple of times, but please include your name and your organization with your question, that allows us to answer the questions we have time for, but get back to you individually if we don't have time for your question on this call.

  So what are we going to talk about today, friends? First off, we're going to kick off with Richard Bates, our director of product. He will share a little bit about our approach to software development. Then we'll explore a few exciting features that are ready right now. This includes digital passes for Apple and Google Wallets. This was one of our most requested features until, drum roll, February when we released it, and many of you and your patrons are enjoying all the benefits. Around a third of you are already using Spektrix payments and your customers particularly love Apple and Google Pay.

  In fact, around 25% are choosing that method of payment. Many of you are up and running with integrated solutions. For merchandising, concessions, courses, camps, fundraising and more, we'll share how that's helping a few Spektrix users meet their most unique requirements. And we'll take a quick look ahead to Spektrix hubs registrations opening next week. We'll also look at the next features we're working on, big focus on some of the most exciting additions to digital marketing through Spektrix plus Dotdigital, and like I said, we're going to close out with your questions using that Q&A button that I mentioned earlier. Again, if you don't see it, find the three little dots at the bottom of your screen, click more and voila, react and Q&A are there. Now I'll hand it over to Rich.

  Thanks so much Mindy, and thanks to everyone here for attending today. It's great to see so many people here on this webinar. So I've been part of the Spektrix team since 2012, but in all those years, I don't think I've ever been more excited about the features we're delivering within a given year as I am for this year. There's a huge amount we've been working on which is now possible and even more that's coming and we're going to be covering lots of those features in today's session. So why am I so excited about all of this stuff? Well, from talking to some of you and conversations that lots of you have had with Spektrix team members, I know how useful the things we've been working on will be for you and your organizations and how much you're going to love using them.

  But before we get into all of that, stepping back a bit, I just wanted to talk a little bit through how we've been growing our software engineering team and our approach. This chart shows the number of people working in the software engineering team at Spektrix over the last few years. As you can see, we've basically doubled the number of people working in this area over that period and we're now maintaining a team of about 80 people working full time on software engineering. And all this is because we care really deeply about delivering great software for the arts industry. We can only do this with a well-staffed team of experienced experts, which is why we've invested in this way in growing the team.

  This year, we are really seeing the fruits of the strategy, but it's also worth adding that only about half of our engineering team of AT are working on the sorts of features we're going to be talking about today. The other half are all working on really important stuff behind the scenes, so they're working on ensuring Spektrix keeps ahead of the curve of technological changes and remains a resilient secure system with a software architecture set up for long-term success. Now that's quite uncommon. Lots of software companies, including within our own sector, don't invest in this way and look to save costs and cut corners and therefore they don't invest in the long-term.

  That cost-cutting approach does not work for us, nor does it match our ambitions as a mission led business to serve you all and this sector for the long term. Frankly, if we took that approach, we'd be falling short of our responsibility we have to the art sector. Technology doesn't stand still, and so we believe it's important to be always thinking ahead and investing in the future, and that's stuff that half that engineering team are working in day in, day out. Now this is because we want to be the leading provider for the sector, not just now, not just for the next few years but for the next 15 to 20 years and into the future. But now back to the near term and one imminent new feature we're working on that I'm really thrilled to share with you today.

  This is the expansion of our offer limits to include limits per customer per event instance. As many of you all know, our offers feature in Spektrix has this concept of limits. These limits mean an offer automatically stops applying whenever they are met. At present you can limit offers in a number of ways, but per customer per event is one of the options. At this option, they apply a discount until that limit is hit, but longer running shows, exhibitions or other events can have loads of specific dates and times known in Spektrix as event instances and it hasn't been possible to apply these offer limits to a specific event instance. But this new feature will allow you to limit offers per customer per event instance in exactly the same way you can order limits offers per customer or per customer per event.

  It will offer a smoother customer experience and new opportunities, especially for organizations with long-running events including discounts for customers who attend the same event or exhibition multiple times, things like annual passes or day entry for members or patrons, especially useful for museums or visitor attractions or discounts for classes and courses, etc. Many of you have asked for this improvement and we're really excited that we possible later this summer. Now all of these offer limits work really smoothly for you setting up offers and for your customers booking online automatically evaluating every offer and all of its limits with every update for a customer's cart. But because these offer limits are so seamless to use, they're actually deceptively tricky for us to code under the hood and make sure the system performs really, really well.

  While it's actually just one new type of offer limit, it's actually one of the technically trickiest corners of code we've worked on for a number of years in the system and that's only possible thanks to that investment I mentioned earlier in our engineering team. We're currently working on final tests for this feature, as I said, and plan to have it available for you all to use later in the summer. That's the first exciting new development we wanted to share today, but there's loads more coming in the session from my colleagues on the call and we're really looking forward to running more of these webinars in the coming months and years as we see even more great functionality land in your Spektrix systems. Thanks once again to all of you for being here and now going to hand back to Mindy.

  Thank you so much, Rich. I love all of those emojis. Offer limits are a pretty darn big deal and it's really exciting that you are the first to know on the globe so congratulations on that front. Apologies for a bit of slide delay and jumping forward. I could say it's a technology error, but let's be honest, there might be some user error involved. I'm not sure, we'll never know. We're not going to pause for questions just yet, but Rich will stick around so if you'd like to know more, pop your questions using that Q&A button and we'll respond at the end of the call.

  Before we look at some of the improvements that are ready for you to use right now, did you know we have a new site that captures all of those new and upcoming improvements? Give me a clap or the emoji of your choice if you have visited this new at Spektrix page. Yes, looks like lots of you have explored it already, but let me say, if you haven't, take a look. The link should be in the chat right now. Make sure you click on the working on button and the exploring buttons to see what's not quite ready yet. Think of this like your trailer or your sneak preview. Each item can also be expanded so that you can see a more detailed description. In fact, if you go right now to the working on section, you will see the offers limit feature that Rich was just sharing. Bookmark this page, revisit it regularly, to keep up to date, and to help inform your future plans.

  Again, this page designed for you, so if you have any suggestions about what might make it even more useful, please send them our way. You can pop those ideas if you have them right now into the chat, but some of us have brilliant ideas at 3:00 A.M. Feel free to drop us a ticket to support and we can check those ideas out if you have them later as well. Next up, we're going to talk about more things that are ready right now. Let's start with digital passes. I'll hand over to Jade Walton, our senior product owner for the customer team, Jade?

  Fantastic, thank you Mindy. I am super excited to talk to everyone about the magic of digital passes. This is the ability for your customers to add digital tickets directly to their device wallets from the ticket delivery email, also known as the print at home email, sent from your Spektrix system. It's 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 even have the option to access a default template so you can get using 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 is an expectation to have access to digital ticket for a streamlined entry into events. There's the ease of use for you and your customers as they can easily find tickets in their device wallets. It's all in one place and there's no need to be searching through emails for tickets purchased months in advance. We offer the flexibility to brand past templates to match your organization and we even now show the event name and date of time of an instance in the print home email. For those emails that do need to be searched, it's easier.

  Now let's take a look at what the email can look like. In a moment we'll be able to see what the... It's just after this one. Here we can see what the ticket delivery email could look like for your customers. You'll see the addition of the Apple and Google Wallet buttons. The PDF will also still get attached to the email. We can also see what a pass looks like on an Apple device in the wallet. 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 you can see the green playhouse.

  Now let's take a brief look into the past designer. Here we have our past designer, and as I'm logged in, you'll be able to see all the passes that I've designed. If I look into the past designer, I can see there are multiple configurability options available for digital passes and all the different types of data that I can show on the front and back of the digital passes. You can customize the information that is displayed on a pass and preview how it looks before you are ready to use it and go live. There's so much more configuration available such as date format, currency, and the ability to specify colors that match your organization.

  Now if we go back into our slides, we can see some examples of live digital passes our clients have configured. Here are some live clients 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 the past designer. Here are some of the feedback provided by clients who were early adopters of digital passes. As you can see, some of the key highlights are, it's positively received from customers, it's super simple pass designer and it's smooth and positive induction into using the functionality. That's all for now on digital passes. If you have any questions, please drop them in the Q&A. Thank you very much.

  Thank you so much, Jade. It's super slick looking, very excited for our digital passes. Now I'll hand over to Mike Powell who's helping organizations explore the benefits of Spektrix Payments and sharing some of those success stories, Mike?

  Thank you Mindy. I'm going to talk to you about Spektrix Payments. This will be familiar to some of you, especially if you've recently moved or you're in the process of moving to Spektrix Payments, but it may be a reminder of some of the features that you now have access to and the impact that you could be seeing. If you are not familiar with Spektrix Payments or you haven't explored it properly yet, I hope this will pique your interest. Spektrix Payments is one-year-old. We are still excited to be shouting about it. Over the past year, we've been able to start to measure the impact that it has had for those users who've moved over.

  As Mindy mentioned, over a third of all our users have already made the switch. Spektrix Payments has allowed us to introduce functionality that otherwise we wouldn't be able to like Apple and Google Pay, and there is more to come as we continue to build on new features in ways that we just couldn't before. 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's buying a ticket for the very first time. Our selected payment partner who makes this possible is Adyen and we have a close working relationship with them.

  Adyen are a global provider based in the Netherlands and they work with some very large organizations like Uber and Spotify processing millions of transactions a day. This is how it works. Adyen replaces your current payment provider. For example, this could be WorldPay or if you're using a payment gateway like authorized.net, it will replace that and your acquiring bank. Spektrix Payments allows us to optimize your transactions and sets us up for future proofing this payments technology. It also allows you to take advantage of Adyen's powerful features like advanced fraud tools.

  Now we know that fraud and chargebacks are something arts organizations are seeing more often, and Adyen's tools help us support you if this is something you want to talk to us about. Let's look at the impact Payments has had for those Spektrix users who've already moved. With Apple and Google Pay, customers can now use their digital wallets for payments as well as for the digital passes we were just hearing about. With many customers purchasing online, when they go through your carefully considered web journeys, we want to make sure that the payment is the easiest part, especially for those first-time bookers. For organizations that have moved to Spektrix Payments, we are seeing on average one in four customers opting for Apple and Google Pay where they have the option.

  Some venues are seeing in excess of 40% of customers opting to pay that way. Apple Pay wasn't available when Spektrix Payments first went live so if you are one of our early adopters, please contact support if you haven't turned Apple Pay on yet. With Spektrix Payments, we are also seeing more transactions going through successfully on the first attempt. For most of our users not on Payments, we're seeing average payment approval rates in the high 80th percentile, which is good, but venues on Spektrix Payments are seeing that rate reach 96% or higher. Again, this reduces barriers for customers to be able to pay for their tickets on the first try with no fuss.

  The knock-on effect is fewer customer calls. Users like Stratford East in the UK have told us that they are getting fewer customers calling for help with online transactions after moving to Spektrix Payments, which frees up their team's time. We're also seeing more transactions going through successfully the first time, but organizations who are also having things like membership schemes and auto-renewing donations, they are also seeing an impact. Payments that auto-renew are reliant on cards being stored and the thing is if cards expire, that can prevent the recurring payment going through.

  Adyen allows cards to automatically be 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 have moved over to Spektrix Payments, the reconciliation process is now simpler with reports coming through Spektrix and Adyen and when organizations they've got to issue a refund to their customers, they have the ability to do so even past the 45-day window. That's what we've seen from users who've already moved, but also when you move to Spektrix Payments, we will provide you with new chip and pin readers free of charge.

  This might not be something that you are using all that often, but they are very useful for taking secure payments in person and because they are fully mobile, you can have roaming team members using them to sell merchandise during a show or taking donations during fundraising events. 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 service experience by resolving query transactions straight away and ensuring that your customers get the tickets that they paid for.

  Just like with Dotdigital, Spektrix is providing this service so we become your frontline support for any issues and we can keep you informed about new features as they are released. 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 of what we have to offer as we continue to make developments. If you are not using Spektrix payments yet, it's easy to make the move, we will take you through the process, which typically takes around 11 days, but we can move faster. If you would like to find out more about our costings, please reach out to us.

  In many cases, we actually represent a saving. 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. Thank you 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 reach out to the Spektrix team.

  Holy wow, that's a lot of value. Thank you, Mike. If you're interested in using Spektrix Payments, we'll pop more information into that follow-up communication as well. Now I'll hand over to Tom Nolan, 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. To enable you to achieve your goals and optimize your operations, we have integrations with an ever-growing number of partners and have 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 on the screen now are just a few of the examples, data is being written back to Spektrix at the center. This data can then be used alongside all of the tools in Spectrix that you'll all already be using, such as segmentation with customer lists, reporting and email and ad automation using Dotdigital.

  Now, before I go on to talk about some of the most recent integrations, 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. It's a little bit of gentle audience participation. On the screen now you'll see a QR code. If you've got your phone to hand, please scan that QR code and respond to the question. Alternatively, you can click the link that we have posted into the chat. I will give that a moment to see if I can see we've got one. We might get a few more of those as people start to fill up here. Cool, excellent.

  I see we've got six, I think we've got about 100 odd people on the call today, so you might see that number go up a little bit more. Cool, get some really interesting ones there. Also, to say that I will be saving these to look at in more detail after the webinar today as well, but this is super interesting to see. Actually spoiler alert, we're going to look at some of those that are on the screen now like Shopify. We're going to go and show you some examples of those as we go through. Awesome. Cool. That is trickling just for a few more moments. Great. I can see there's a few of those that we're going to come on to talk about in just a few moments, so that's really great to see those there and some great ones for us to go and have a bit of a further look into as well. Excellent, cool.

  If we move on to the next slide, Mindy, that's excellent. 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 website 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 wanted to call out a few of our newest integrations, some of which were listed on the slider there, which is great to see. For those of you who are currently offering classes and camps as part of your program, we now have integrations with a range of class and camp registration platforms.

  Our class and camp registration partners focus on providing smooth registrations for your customers, offering functionality such as detailed attendee data capture, waivers, and payment plans. All of the data relating to the buyer will flow directly into Spektrix. From the Spektrix customer record, you'll be able to see all of their interactions from class bookings to memberships, donations, and ticket purchases. These class and camp registration platforms can be set up quickly with subscriptions that start from $150 a month and a growing number of Spektrix users are already making use of these integrated class and camp registration platforms.

  Britt Music & Arts Festival in Jackson, Oregon run an outdoor summer performing arts festival. They're now using Sawyer alongside Spektrix to handle applications and registrations to their rock camps and master classes. Through the integration, all of these interactions are automatically logged in Spektrix as the central CRM. The single customer record in Spektrix is being complimented by these applications and registrations. Green Box Arts in Colorado use CourseStorm and Spektrix for their campus program capturing granular data as is needed for these types of registrations with the Booker's data logged centrally in Spectrix. 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 experience and in-person retail experience. These integrations allow you to see all gift shop, food and beverage purchases against a single customer record in Spectrix alongside all of the rich data already held about the customer in Spektrix. I'm especially excited about the integrations with Shopify and Square as we know that lots of you are already making use of these products.

  Storyhouse in Chester in the UK 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 this 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 they hold. That spend and the detail of the items they've purchased is then written back to Spektrix, giving them even more insight into their member's behavior across all of their activity. Whereas before they relied on assumptions of their member's behavior, they now have the data to inform their engagement strategies.

  A number of organizations are already using Shopify to power their online shop with all of the data flowing back to Spektrix, giving them full insights into customer's purchase behavior across all 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're purchasing and can then use this data to identify potential members and high spenders. Saratoga Performing Arts Center in New York who can easily include their Shopify customers in their general marketing communication as any new shop customer will automatically have customer records created in Spektrix. For nonprofit organizations, we've recently built out integrations with even more fundraising tools.

  We are just finalizing an integration which I'm particularly excited about 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 these wealth scores written to the customer record in Spektrix. That data can then be used in segmentation, can power specific donation asks, dynamic content and email campaigns and refine your outreach. We've also got integrations with a range of fundraising tools.

  Fundraise Up powers quick donation asks, prompting recurring giving and uses AI tools to tweak the donation ask and Givebutter provides quick and recurring donation functionality as well as auction management tools. With all of these tools, customer transactions are written back to the customer record in Spektrix. By making use of these integrated products, you build up a deeper understanding of a customer's interactions with you so here's what that can start to look like in Spektrix. From that initial account creation, which could come from a signup on your website, a signup from your in-venue Wi-Fi, or from an integration with an integrated platform like Square or Shopify, with sales processed directly in Spectrix, you'll be identifying customer's ticket purchasing preferences based on their booking trends.

  This can then be supplemented by the data you collect through integrated class and camp platforms so you gain visibility of their registrations to 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 job, easily spotting high-value spends. All of this can be used to power personalized communication both at the box office and across 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 have visited the bar this month and spent over $100 and use that alongside all the other rich data that you already have in Spektrix. In this example, customers who have attended four or more events spent over $100 at the bar and are not current membership holders. 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 visit our partner directory for more information on any of our integrated partners.

  Thank you so much, Tom. I'm ready to go to arts camp in Colorado and be recognized as a member at the bar, thank you very much. Again, put those questions into Q&A and in the meantime we're going to close off this section with a sneak preview of Spektrix Hubs with the Brooke Gallagher.

  Thank you Mindy. Hi everyone, I'm Brooke. My pronouns are she, her and I head up the community and events team here at Spektrix. Spektrix Hubs are our in-person day-long events that are designed to enhance your use of this Spektrix system, create connections, and empower you with the resources that you need to achieve your goals. They are free to attend apart from any travel or accommodation that you might need and this year they're taking place in Denver, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, New York, and Orlando in the fall. Give me an emoji if you're close enough to one of these cities to come see us. We're going to be sending out invitations via email to you all next week. To avoid any disappointment we have had to turn on waiting lists in the past.

  I'd really encourage you to go ahead and get yourself signed up. We're currently rustling up an incredible program for all of you, including some sessions that our team delivers. It's really focused on the Spektrix system and tools as well as talks from your peers in the sector, opportunities for you to meet one-on-one with our client success specialists and the return of the Hubs workbook, which is modeled here by some of our wonderful users to ensure that you can take all of your ideas back to the office. We do understand it can be a bit tricky to maintain that momentum after the day. I just want to finish with a testimonial that we had from a 2024 Hubs attendee who shared this beautiful thought with us. I'll leave that with you. I really hope to see you all there. Thanks.

  Thank you so much, Brooke. Our final section before Q&A today is where we get a sneak peek at what else we're working on with just a few features we're going to be releasing later this year. As ever, all of these improvements will appear in your Spektrix or Dotdigital systems automatically. You won't need to run any updates or pay anything extra to enjoy these benefits. Now to Ben Snell, our marketing automation solution lead.

  Thank you, Mindy. Hi everyone. I'm Ben and it's my role at Spektrix to help our clients make the most out of our integration with Dotdigital. This year we have lots of exciting updates coming to this integration to help you communicate with your audience 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. 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 who unsubscribed for marketing communications may miss out on essential information relating to those changes or cancellations.

  We're 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, or cast news and trigger them from Spektrix. 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 producing the opportunity for unauthorized ticket resales. It can be a stressful time when you need to cancel events and return or refund tickets. 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 keep or return commissions or other levies or whether to send 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. 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 assessing risk and reaching decisions and links to resources within Spectrix to help you out in an emergency.

  We'll send that link out in our post-event email. It may not be what you want to think about now, but a little preparation could save a lot of pain when it does happen. The next set of updates we're bringing to Dotdigital are 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. To achieve this, we're going to be adding more data to our Dotdigital integration and it's additional data that will unlock advanced personalization.

  For example, here we have an event in Spektrix which are going to be syncing to products in Dotdigital. Here we've synced the name, image and attributes. We've also brought across the description, dates and times duration and the events ID. We're applying the same approach to website data, pulling in web browsing data, cart data and also to ticket sales, which are syncing to orders in Dotdigital. This additional data can be used on building campaigns and it unlocks some exciting functionality I can't wait to share with you. The best way to share this with three example emails, and please keep in mind what you're about to see is still a work in progress. On the screen right now, I've started building out my summer season newsletter and I'm about to sync some events.

  In the past that would've meant manually going and getting that data from summary from Spektrix from a third party source and adding this in. But now because I've synced to that data, I can use the product block. This means the data matches exactly what's in Spektrix, saving me time and ensuring it's accurate. I'm going to go for my biggest summer season, the show Jaws. Straight away, I get the image from Spektrix, the names come through and I could start changing this around the layout and deciding what fields I want to add to my email as well. Price here you'll see is come across as zero, and that's because in Spektrix price is usually not just one number, it can be a table of different ticket types and price bands. Instead I've used an attribute to bring across my price, so the dates using the first and last instance and let's go forward description as well.

  Not quite the right orders, let's reorganize those. If I go back and go back to my fields again, they've all gone to the top and I can just reorganize these by just moving them up and down the list. Perfect. If I want to, I can now style my email so I can use the text options at the top, increasing size, changing fonts, making it bold, whatever I need to do to make it fit my email and my brand. Right now, Jaws is my link to my website. It's using the web URL stored in Spectrix to link people over to my website, but if I want to, instead I can use a button which I can change the colour of and the design and the wording.

  I don't just have to have one event in my product block. I can have multiple events. Let's go ahead and add a couple more. Let's go with Holst. Again, all this data is coming through my Spectrix integration, so it's all matches exactly what's in that system. And if I go for Hamlet as well, here we go. This time I get two events side by side and again, I can change the layout if I want to or I could reorder them. Change which way around the display as well is by dragging them. I can quickly change my fields, just add the description to this and I'll quickly add another button and start it to fit with the rest of my email. I know how important branding is to everyone.

  Again, if I want to, I can change my text pretty quickly and easily and it changes across both so you see Hamlet's affected the next event. There we go. I've added three events to my email using static data so far. But what if I also wanted to advertise to this customer, something dynamic. What if I wanted to try and upsell them something based on their booking history? Well, I can use Dotdigital's product recommendations. Here I've got some already set up. I've got our bestsellers, which would show this customer the items which are selling really well using order data we've synced from Spektrix. Lookalike soap, finding customers who behave like the customer who receives this email and showing similar events that they've booked to this customer.

  Most viewed from my website data and this final one, musicals is using the genre attribute I've got in Spectrix to filter to just musicals and then I've looked for future musicals with availability that this customer hasn't booked yet. I can pop that. In fact, I'm going to go with that one and I can change the layout. I can choose how many events I want to display. I'm going to try and match what I've been doing so far. Just do two to match the block above. And again, all the same fields are here as it was with my product block so I can remove my price and include descriptions and buttons. There's also at the very bottom an option to change the image sizes that I get from Spektrix as well. If they don't quite match, I can change my image ratio.

  Let's just match it with the rest of the email and there we go. Let's preview. Let's see what this looks like. Very quickly in just a few minutes, I've begun to build out my summer season newsletter. There we go. Jaws, Holston, Hamlet, and at the bottom, a new chorus line. Great. So let's move on to my second email. That's using the data to build out events. Let's look at instead basket or cart abandonment. This time I've already got my email started. I've got my header and my footer and now I want to add a new block that we've built to this email. On the bottom left you'll see at the bottom there's a Spektrix folder. In here, there are some new blocks that we've built. They work almost the same as the Dotdigital ones. You can drag these across and drop them in and that pops a wizard. And here I can choose some customization options.

  For the title of my email, we'll see all this in a minute. The text, it's going to appear at the top including a informal salutation so I can pull in the customer's name from Spektrix, choose to conclude the event name, description, and my date format as well. And then I could change my button text if I wanted to as well. Let's see what this looks like. If I preview this, it's going to show nothing first of all, but let me find a customer who's got an abandoned cart and I've been browsing the website today. You can see the text at the top there. There's my image from Hamlet and Carmen and you can see the descriptions and dates have all pulled through automatically and a link as well over to my website where I could pick my event.

  If there was only one instance I could link through to the seating plan. However, that button's not quite the right color. So if I wanted to, I could use the utilities manage styles and quickly change the paragraph styles or the texts and fonts and their sizes and also recolor my button. If I wanted to, I can edit my block, change my date format, you'll pick it up straight away. In fact, I'm going to remove the event names because the images have the event names. I don't need to have the event names doubled up. Let's remove that. Let's have a quick look and that should have picked up all my styling straight away. Perfect. Now to send that, we can use a program. We've got a template program ready to go for that as well.

  In fact, one more final thing I could do is I could actually add a product recommendation to the bottom of this email as well. Let's say bestsellers, maybe a bit of a title that says something like you may also be interested in something like that, and I could pull through some of those so I can combine the tools together. But finally, I want to show pre-show emails. Now, pre-show emails that existed for a while, but up till now we've only synced to cross event name, dates, and times. We've got a new block, which I want to show you some of the new stuff that we've been working on. If I grab the pre-show block and drop it in again, the wizard will open. Here, I've got an option to add the venue, the duration, date format, and to show supplementary events. Let's apply that. Let's preview this one.

  I know my default customer has got a booking. Come and see Carmen. If I scroll down, we'll see we've got the image dynamically, couldn't get images in the past. Then underneath we've got venue, date and time duration, link off to our supplementary events, link to add to digital wallets, seat information where they can be sitting, the ticket type and the door of our seat attribute and our QR code. Again, this is a work in progress and this may change. We may reorder this and we have multiple options, so you can style this in different ways. Let's click this link though to go to our supplementary events page and it's found the exact specific supplementary event page for my matching event.

  You'll see here Friday, May 2nd. If I go back to my email, that's what this customer's coming to Friday, May 2nd. There we go. I could also again add in some lookalikes if I wanted to to my email, some more automatic recommendations even in my pre-show. Again, that's just three examples of how you can use this new data. I can't wait to share more about these features in the coming months. I'm now going to hand back to Mindy for the Q&A.

  Seriously you all, that is some exciting stuff and I have to say, you know a marketer when even in a demo, they need their font size to match across the formatting. Love it, Ben. Really exciting stuff. We're going to spend a few minutes in Q&A. Very excited to be able to answer a few of your questions. If by any chance we do not get to your question, you can simply resubmit it with your name and organization. If you already submitted it with your name and your organization, look at you following the rules and you don't have to resubmit. Our first question today is going to be from Jeff at the Weinberg Center. Can you scan the PDF of your print at home tickets just the same as you used to with the use of digital passes? So Rich.

  Yes, I'll take that. And the answer is yes you can. The tickets that you get, whether they come from the print at home PDF or whether they come from a digital pass, they have a barcode or a QR code, it's all a representation of exactly the same ticket and our exact same scanners that you use to scan the PDF versions will scan the digital pass versions, whether it's on an Apple phone or a Google phone. The good news is because they all link back to the same ticket, if some sneaky patron tried to show the PDF version and then come back with their digital pass version, it wouldn't let them in because it would've been marked as that ticket's already been scanned. So it is all super secure from that perspective as well.

  Sneaky patrons, what are you talking about, Rich?

  I know.

  No such thing. Our next question, I'm going to keep you in the hot seat, Rich. So also on digital passes, will we need specific scanners to read the QR codes versus barcodes?

  Good question as well. The exact same scanners that work the same hardware that many of you will already have for scanning PDF tickets will work to scan the QR codes and the digital passes or even as Ben was just showing us on the Dotdigital thing there, if you put the QR codes in those enhanced pre-show emails that are coming later in the year, it can all be scanned from the same scanners all over the place and we'll get back to the same result.

  Amazing. I'm letting Rich off the hot seat. Jade, this one is for you. Is it possible to add the ability to adjust font size in the passes?

  It's not currently possible to adjust the font size in the passes. However, that is a super idea and we do have it raised in our backlog so it is something that we are going to be looking into making available in the near future.

  Amazing. I love it when things are already on the radar. Here's a question from Bethany at the Peter Britt Music and Arts Fest. Let's see. I'm very excited about the iWave integration. Is there a timeline of when that's expected to be available? Tom, you are all timeline.

  I'm all about the timeline. We are just in the process of doing the final tweaks to that integration so it's going to be in the next few weeks I would say. But Bethany, I will make a note that's actually you're very interested and we'll let you know. We've got a few other organizations that I know are keen on it as well. So we will let you know the moment it's ready. But I'd say yeah, probably a couple of weeks time.

  Amazing. A couple of weeks, not too shabby. Ben, I've got one for you here from Elizabeth at the Port Theatre. What happens if someone unsubscribes from Dotdigital through the Dotdigital side and we can no longer reach them in an emergency?

  The new emails that we're working on is a completely different engine to the marketing emails, these service emails. It uses Dotdigital's transactional email engine so the unsubscribes are separate. If you've unsubscribed from marketing emails at any point, doesn't matter, you can still email out using the transactional email side that we're using for the new ones so yeah, separate unsubscribes.

  Isn't that such a relief? I mean, didn't anyone else have their shoulders just relax a little bit when you heard that answer? I definitely did. We've got a great question, Mike, for you from Giana at, and forgive me if I'm not, Gina, at Sensei Sheikh, I'm saying that part right and I am so sorry if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly. We're already live with Spektrix Payments and have a few chip and pen terminals live. How can we get more? They just want more Mike, tell us.

  That's okay. We have a fair use policy so if you've got a couple of pen pads but you think you need another one, just get in touch with support and they'll be happy to help you order more.

  Love it when more is right at your fingertips. Let's see, for Mike, again, you're staying on the hot seat. I didn't catch you in time to save you from having to click your video off. Apologies. Paula from the Moss Center, you mentioned the free payment, but I'm not sure what you meant. Are the credit card machines free? Is the support fee free? Is the service free? Let's dig into that free.

  Sure. Okay, so we will provide you with the chip readers for free. There is a charge for Spektrix Payments and if you want to understand what that is, we're happy to talk that through. Just get in touch with support and they can put you in touch with me or with somebody else in the payments team. We can talk you through that. There is no fee to actually move over though and to go live with Spektrix Payments. This is something that you can take advantage of straight away and we can get you live very, very quickly.

  Excellent. Here's one that is just pure logistics. Will we be able to access this video later? I would like to share this with our staff, obviously with your family and friends as well. This will be sent out via email and it will be available on our new at Spektrix page, which obviously you bookmarked because I told you to. And you're all very good listeners. There will be multiple ways to get to this recording. We would love for you to share this with your team. We think this information is so incredibly valuable. I know we're getting close on time. I'm going to try for one more question. Let's see. How can I reach out to suggest a feature I'd love to see in Spektrix? That's a great question. Rich, I'm actually going to hand that one to you.

  Yeah, I'll take that. We will take ideas and feature requests anyway they come. So whether it's you are chatting to us on the phone to one of our client success team, throw the idea into the conversation and they'll pass it on to the rest of the team here. Whether you want to email us at 2:00 A.M. when you have that idea in the middle of the night, whether you bumping into us all of our events and you want to chat something through, let us know. So yeah, we'll take it any direction that comes, we're always pleased to hear them. And yeah, really do keep all those conversations coming in because it really helps us prioritize, decide what we're doing and know that what we're working on is the most valuable things it can be.

  Amazing, I have to say Rich is a very good listener so highly recommend reaching out, letting us know what you're thinking about. Friends, our time together, we only have 60 seconds, so let me download just a smidge more information into your brains and a huge slice of gratitude. You have spent an hour with us. I know how busy you are and I hope that this hour has been incredibly valuable for you. Thank you so much for being here, for listening for bookmarking pages, for using emojis. Thank you to everybody who posted a question. If we did not have time to answer your question, please know that we will get back in touch with you again, resubmit it if you forgot to include your org and your name because otherwise we don't know how to reach you. Let's see. Don't forget to bookmark that page.

  We will be sending a communication to your inbox, so keep an eye out for that. And that will include all of the links and some additional resources and after we close our call today, you will actually have a survey that pops up on your screen. Please tell us how we did, what was helpful, give us feedback. That is so, so important. We are a culture of feedback and we thrive on it. It's really critical for us to make this time as valuable for you as possible. Good news, it is a three question survey. We respect your time and we so appreciate you. Thanks again and ciao for now.