Illuminate and Spektrix

UK clients who are funded by Arts Council England as National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) will need to report on their activity using Illuminate.

Illuminate is an audience data tool created by PricewaterhouseCoopers. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers and Arts Council England have made use of Spektrix integration tools in order to enable you to sync data from your Spektrix system to this platform. This means you won’t need to manually upload customer and sales data into Illuminate. This article will direct you to additional resources supplied by both Illuminate and Arts Council England where you can learn more about this topic.

You can seek further guidance on sending data to Illuminate, including how to access the Spektrix Event ID, by contacting Illuminate on uk_illuminate_support@pwc.com or by calling 0800 031 867.

Fill in the Assign Ticketing Provider form

To share your data with Illuminate, you will first need to complete the Assign Ticketing Provider form.

Input the following information:

Ticketing Provider: Spektrix

Reference: Enter your Spektrix client name

Provider Key: You can leave this empty (it’s not required for our integration)

How to grant Illuminate access to your data feed

The Illuminate platform can receive your customer data and ticket sales data from Spektrix via a data feed. 

In order for the data feed to pull through to Illuminate, you will need to:

• Grant PricewaterhouseCoopers access to your data. (You’ll need to have permissions to access the Settings Interface to make this change.) 

For more information on how to complete these steps, visit the Training pages within Illuminate and navigate to the 'API Connection for Box Office Integration' section. You will need an Illuminate account to access this information. 

Adding your Events

To make sure your customer and ticket sales data is sent to Illuminate via the Spektrix data feed, you’ll need to create copies of each of your Events in Spektrix on the Illuminate platform.

WARNING: If the Spektrix Event ID is not entered against the event in Illuminate, then the Spektrix data feed will not pull into the Illuminate platform. You can find guidance on how to find your Spektrix Event ID and where to input this on the Illuminate platform in the Illuminate Training pages.

You can upload Events individually or make use of the Illuminate have a Bulk Event Upload feature that allows you to create Events on the platform in bulk.

Using Illuminate’s Bulk Event Upload feature

In this section we’ll cover how to request a custom report from our team and use this in conjunction with Illuminate’s Bulk Event Upload feature to automatically send your event information to Illuminate.

You can find more information on this feature on the Training pages within Illuminate.

We have created a custom Report that can help you with using the Illuminate Bulk Event Upload feature. Contact support to request that we add this to your system.

Once you have the report, you can export information about your events that  matches Illuminate’s ‘Events Upload Template’. This means that when you run the Report from your Spektrix system it will have all the column headings required for Illuminate’s Bulk Event Upload Feature. 

WARNING: For this Report to run as required, you need to chose “Run as Excel” (not as a PDF or unformatted Excel), then ensure to save it as an .xlxs file in order for it to work with the   Bulk Event Uploader tool.

When you run this report for the first time there will be blank cells for the columns  “Event Type”, “Is Funded”, “Sub Discipline” and “Distribution Type”.

You can fill these blanks in manually or follow the steps below to add this information into your system using Event Attributes. Once you have added the Event Attributes to each of your Events your report should return without any blanks.

Using Event Attributes

Event Attributes can be used to return information for the fields in Illuminate called “Event Type”, “Is Funded”, “Sub Discipline” and “Distribution Type”. 

To do this, first you’ll need to set up the new Attributes with the exact names (and capitalisation) and settings from the table below. Set up each Attribute as a Dropdown value.

Then you will need to update each Event in your system and assign each Attribute value. 

WARNING: The Event Attributes in your Spektrix system must use the exact names (including exact capitalisation) from the table below. These columns in the Report will not populate if the Attribute names do not match exactly.

The Attributes do not need to be visible in your API integrations, and we advise not allowing users to enter free text for the Attributes. It is up to you if you make the Attributes always required or not.

Once your Spektrix Events are set up and linked to Illuminate, customer and ticket sales data will automatically go into the platform via the Spektrix data feed. 

You’ll need to run and upload this report every time you want to add a new Event into your data feed.

Further Reading

For more guidance on the Illuminate platform, how to set up data sharing, access Spektrix Event IDs, using the Bulk Event Uploader, and how to grant permission to access data visit the Illuminate Training Pages. 

You can also find a comprehensive Illuminate FAQ section on Arts Council England website.

You can contact Illuminate on uk_illuminate_support@pwc.com or by calling 0800 031 867.