Strategies for reservation and attendee collection

Soapbox Events provides several options for collecting information through the reservation process. To determine which options are best for your particular event, it is helpful to review where the data is saved in Salesforce, if you have Salaesforce integration enabled, and what your priorities are.

Context: Where data is saved

All reservation information is saved to the Lead record in Salesforce. Upon Lead conversion by the Salesforce Events for Salesforce managed package, data from the Lead is saved to a Contact and Account (Organization) record for new data with all data about the reservation transaction saved to a new Opportunity (Donation) record.

Attendee information is saved first to a Ticket Temp object where it awaits conversion of the associated reservation Lead. Upon conversion, the Ticket Temp records are moved to the Tickets object and associated with the appropriate Opportunity (Donation) record and Campaign.

Attendee information is not automatically converted to a Contact and Lead. Creation of a Contact or Lead from a Ticket record holding attendee information must be done manually. This is partially due to the reality that many visitors, when reserving multiple tickets, may not know the specific people who will be using those tickets so that, even if attendee fields are enabled and required, this data may not be reliable enough to include as Contacts in Salesforce.

Options for reservation data collection

The various options you have for collecting data in the reservation process are as follows:

• Collect only data for the reservation standard fields
• Enable but do not require attendee standard fields
• Enable and require attendee standard fields

You also have the ability to 1) set a Maximum Tickets value for a given ticket type per reservation; and 2) add custom Salesforce fields to the attendee form but not the reservation form.

Strategies for reservation data collection to meet you priorities

Allow for visitors to easily register for multiple tickets

If your priority is to make the reservation process as easy as possible for visitors to register on behalf of others, you'll want to 1) Enable Attendee Fields; 2) choose the attendee fields you wish to show or require; 3) use the Tickets lists and reports in Salesforce to view expected attendees; and 4) use the  Export Attendees option, if you wish to export a CSV list from Soapbox.

Create Contacts for all event attendees

If your priority is to ensure that Contacts are created in Salesforce automatically for each attendee, we recommend that you set the Maximum Tickets to 1 so that each attendee will need to reserve their own ticket.

If you wish to collect additional information from that attendee, you can 1) Enable Attendee Fields; and 2) include custom Salesforce fields in the attendee information section but not enable the contact information standard fields.

If you have only one ticket type for this event, you may also wish to set the Minimum Ticket value to 1 and set Expand Attendee Info Form to "On ticket selection". This will cause the attendee info section to be displayed when the reservation form loads initially.