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Introduction to Events and Instances

Rachael Norris
Rachael Norris
  • Updated

Before you are able to start selling tickets on your system, you’ll need to set up your Events and Instances. 

This article is a great place to start if you are new to setting up Events and Instances in Spektrix, or if you just need a refresher on the basics.


Before you read this article, make sure you’re familiar with:

 

What are Events and Instances?

In Spektrix, Events and Instances are concepts which have their own specific definitions.

An Event can be thought of as a ‘run’, ‘show’, or ‘production’ containing multiple performances. An Event holds data such as the Name and Description and can contain one or multiple Instances.

An Instance can be thought of as a single performance or occurrence as part of a run of multiple. Instances contain information about the individual date and time for a specific occurrence of the event.

For example, an Event would be “The Book of Will” by Lauren Gunderson and the Instance would be the 7pm Friday performance.

VIDEO: If you're new to Events and Instances, take a look at our Events and Instances concept video.

 

Setting up Events and Instances

Events and Instances are interdependent and you’ll always need to start by first creating your Event and then your Instance. 

In order to create your Instances, there are a number of other elements that you must set up on your Spektrix system first. 

Events and Instances are set up in the Admin Interface so you’ll need the General Administrator user role to be able to be able to access this.

For more information about setting up Events and Instances, take a look at the Support Centre articles:

TIP: If your organisation uses Artifax, take a look at the Artifax Event Importer which allows you to set up events in Artifax and then import key pieces of information directly into Spektrix, speeding up the Event setup process and ensuring consistency between the two systems.

 

Editing and Updating Instances

After you have created your Events and Instances, you are able to update some of the details if things change at a later date.

For step-by-step instructions on how to edit Events and Instances, take a look at the Editing section of the How to Set Up an Instance article.

In situations where you want to update multiple Instances across multiple Events, you might want to take a look at the Bulk Instance Updater Tool.

In the eventuality that you have to cancel or reschedule an Event or Instance, take a look at the following articles:



Ways to Configure your Events

Whether you want to collect extra information at the point of sale, or create a pre-sale using a Priority Booking period, there are several ways in which you can configure your Events:

  • Customer Questionnaire

    You can use the Customer Questionnaire to collect data about how your customers heard about your events at the point of sale.
  • Priority Booking

    Priority Booking allows you to specify a group of customers who can book online Events before their Start Selling Date, or general on-sale. 

 

Upselling and Cross-Selling

Alongside your Events you may wish to also set up things like Merchandise or Supplementary Events. Take a look at the following articles to find out more about how to set this up.

  • Upselling Using Supplementary Events

    Supplementary Events can be used to offer secondary spend items (e.g. pre-show dining / drinks package or car parking etc.) whilst your customer is buying tickets for another Event on your website.  

TIP: If you sell items such as meal deals or car parking vouchers as Supplementary Events and you don't want these to be included in your reports by default, you can choose to exclude these Instances from Metrics at any time.

  • Cross Selling Using Recommended Events

    Recommended Events can be used to promote related Events whilst your customer is buying tickets for another Event on your website.

  • Merchandise

    Adding Merchandise is a great way to sell additional items like shop products or stock.

Selling and Reporting on Events

With your Event and Instances now set up, you might want to move on to selling tickets.

In the Sell Items and Fulfill Orders category on the Support Centre there are a number of articles to take you through the basics of selecting a Ticket, adding a Customer to the basket and selecting a Delivery Method.

When it comes to reporting, Reports in Spektrix is the place to start to get an overview of how reports work before moving on to the Guide to Standard Reports which is a one-stop-shop for all of the included reports available in Spektrix.

 

Further Reading

In this article we’ve covered how Events can be configured in lots of different ways. To carry on learning about Event Set Up, we recommend the following articles: