Why is the "Ticket Holder” Field Blank in Salesforce or Why are Event Attendees not Created as Contacts in Salesforce?

At this time, our Soapbox Events packages for Salesforce do not create contacts for each event attendee. This is because if someone comes as a guest to one your events they haven't necessarily opted in to a relationship with your organization (since they did not actually purchase the tickets and they were not the ones filling out the information online). As a result of that, if you want to enable the attendee fields, you will end up with 1 opportunity record for the overall registration transaction with one or more ticket child records. If you collect attendee info for your event, Tickets will show the main purchaser in the Purchaser field and attendee info as plain text fields. The Ticket Holder lookup (contact) field will be blank by default.

You can find some more high-level information about different strategies that can be used to collect attendee information at the following: Strategies or reservation and attendee collection. 

There are a few things you can do from here:

1) Nothing. You could choose to leave the Ticket Holder field blank and even remove it from the page layout if you don't want to use it. You can still do all of the same reporting to find the ticket holder information based on the Tickets object and the custom fields there. The only difference is that the tickets would not be related back to a contact in your database and your relationship would be focused on the purchaser.

2) You could come up with a strategy to manually update the Ticket Holder field. This would involve manually checking for an existing contact to add in the Ticket Holder field. If the contact is new, you would need to add the contact separately and then lookup. If you manually match a Ticket to a Contact through the Ticket Holder lookup field, this will display a contact's Assigned Tickets as a related list below their Contact record.

3) You could export event attendees and import using a bulk data loader tool with a Lead Source = Event Name. This would get folks into your database as contacts but would not match back to the campaign or tickets without additional steps (since those are separate objects).

4) You could work with a Salesforce partner to automate the process of searching for an existing contact (by email field perhaps) and connecting to the ticket if found or creating a new contact and connecting to the ticket if an existing contact is not found. If you would like to pursue this option but don't have a Salesforce partner yet, check out all of PICnet's great Salesforce partners at: http://soapboxengage.com/partners.

Ultimately the best solution here will depend on your organization's relationship with attendees who were registered as guests of a purchaser. Again, if you collect custom fields for individual attendees, you can always export them from Salesforce to use for lists, badges or mailings without matching them back to contact records.