If you have an event where you think immediate demand will exceed availability, you can use our ticket lottery feature to provide your customers with a more equitable experience.
How to set up an event with a ticket lottery
Set up your lottery in your event admin. Choose Manage, then Interest/Lottery/Curated. On that page, select Lottery. The Interest List feature can be used to collect email addresses of interested customers and Curated lets you specifically invite chosen attendees to acquire tickets.
Name your lottery, such as "Early Bird Lottery" or "Festival Ticket Lottery", and enter an optional description. If you want to password protect the lottery, you can enter a event-lottery-specific password too. Finally, select the dates that your lottery will take place.
You'll see a new lottery overview page with the fields you just filled out, as well as a summary of who has expressed interest. If anyone has, you can click and see that list along with their lottery status.
As event admins, you can monitor this list and remove people if they are unwelcome at your event.
Customer Experience
The Multipass lottery system streamlines the process by letting customers join the lottery, pre-authorize their payment method, and get charged for their ticket(s) when they are selected in the lottery. Customers that aren't chosen in the lottery get notified and will not be charged.
When you've enabled a lottery on your event, customers looking to buy tickets will see that a lottery is in effect. Customers complete the entire purchase process for the tickets they want, and their card will be pre-authorized but not charged. They can complete this process any time in the six days prior to the lottery launch date, and they don't have to be online or in a virtual waiting room when tickets drop. Signing up in advance is all they have to do.
Anyone attempting to purchase tickets after the lottery selection process starts, but before it's concluded, will be added to the "end of the line", in the order attempted purchases are made. Once the lottery concludes, the event moves to general sale and any inventory that is left can be purchased normally.
The Lottery Timeline
When the lottery time arrives three things will take place, in the following order:
- All buyers will be sorted into a randomized order
- Multipass will go down the list and determine, in this new order, if enough tickets remain to fill a given order request. Orders are marked as approved but cards have not yet been charged and tickets have not been issued. This gives people near immediate insight into their lottery status.
- Multipass processes all approved lottery purchases. This involves capturing funds and issuing tickets. The buyer will receive an email to notify them that they have tickets.
- Anyone who did not receive lottery tickets will then receive an email that they were not selected.