Using BBMS MobilePay: Guest Post from Audrey McAbee
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The Craft Beer Festival is a one-day event that we have in May. This was our second year of the event and both years it has been wildly popular. The event features 15 craft breweries and over 40 craft beer selections. We also have live music, some terrific food vendors and lectures on beer held throughout the day.
We sell tickets in advance online, but also on the day of the event. The first year we had 1,200 in attendance, and this year we had 1,450 in attendance. Out of those, probably 1/3 bought tickets at the door. The first year we had a cash only policy for tickets sold at the door, but we did have two laptops set up to sell tickets for anyone using credit cards, just in case.
For this year's event we used MobilePay for tickets sold at the door. We had two lines set up, one line for those who pre-registered where we had several laptops set up and could scan in their ticket, check their ID and issue their 21 and over bracelets. The second line was set up with two cash boxes and two iPads, both of which were hooked up to the MobilePay to take credit card transactions. This also allowed all of our laptops to be used in the pre-registration line so they could check people through faster. Our prices were very standard - $40 for a ticket, or $15 for a non-drinker ticket, which had the added benefit of allowing us to easily figure out quantity at the end of the night.
How MobilePay works:
When someone wished to pay with credit card, we typed the total into MobilePay and hit enter, which takes you to the credit card swiping screen. You swipe the card, it processes, and then the signature screen pops up. The guest would sign with their finger and once you press ok, there is an option of adding your email address where it can email you a copy of their receipt. Surprisingly very few people wished for a copy to be emailed to them, most skipped over this.
It was a very fast process, our line never got backed up and we were able to keep it constantly moving. The only issue really was that with so many guests all logging onto our WiFi the moment they came in our door, it slowed our connection down for all our laptops and iPads. The only other confusion was that a lot of guests didn't understand signing with their finger, they kept asking for a pen and I'd have to explain that you sign with your finger!
Once the ticket selling time was complete, we retired one of the iPads. The second iPad was then taken to our Information Booth where people could buy single beer tickets or t-shirts. Once again it was very easy pricing - $20 a shirt, and $4 a single beer ticket. I noted the time that we switched out so I knew at the end of the night that everything we sold after 2:30 would be either a shirt or single beer ticket.
That night, after the event, I logged into BBMS and pulled the transactions for the day, filtering by MobilePay transactions. It pulled a list of all MobilePay transactions which I exported to Excel. I then added additional fields to the Excel sheet to put in quantity sold per transaction. So I added a ticket field, a non-drinker ticket field, a t-shirt field and a single beer ticket field. I wrote in quantity ($55 would be a ticket and a non-drinker ticket) and was able to tally all of our totals relatively quickly. I then input those into Altru using a dummy payment of Other>MobilePay that I had created to track anything sold through MobilePay. That way our Accounting offices would always know that those sales came through MobilePay and not directly through Altru. It kept everything very clean and because it was entered into Altru the same day it was sold and processed by BBMS, all of our records reconciled.
MobilePay was a very easy process. It was very similar to Square, which we used a year ago for our outdoor Pirate Festival. We do plan to use MobilePay again. A word of advice: make sure that whoever uses it, immediately adds the numbers into Altru at the end of the event because otherwise it will throw off Finance if it was processed through BBMS on a different day than it shows on all the Altru sales and revenue reports. I think it will be even faster next time because we have installed WiFi throughout our entire Museum and are upgrading our bandwidth. Our WiFi actually extends outside our Museum to some of our outdoor event spaces as well, and we have a hotspot for places our WiFi won't reach so it will be very helpful for outdoor events as well.
You can check out our page for more images of the event itself.
- Audrey McAbee
We sell tickets in advance online, but also on the day of the event. The first year we had 1,200 in attendance, and this year we had 1,450 in attendance. Out of those, probably 1/3 bought tickets at the door. The first year we had a cash only policy for tickets sold at the door, but we did have two laptops set up to sell tickets for anyone using credit cards, just in case.
For this year's event we used MobilePay for tickets sold at the door. We had two lines set up, one line for those who pre-registered where we had several laptops set up and could scan in their ticket, check their ID and issue their 21 and over bracelets. The second line was set up with two cash boxes and two iPads, both of which were hooked up to the MobilePay to take credit card transactions. This also allowed all of our laptops to be used in the pre-registration line so they could check people through faster. Our prices were very standard - $40 for a ticket, or $15 for a non-drinker ticket, which had the added benefit of allowing us to easily figure out quantity at the end of the night.
How MobilePay works:
When someone wished to pay with credit card, we typed the total into MobilePay and hit enter, which takes you to the credit card swiping screen. You swipe the card, it processes, and then the signature screen pops up. The guest would sign with their finger and once you press ok, there is an option of adding your email address where it can email you a copy of their receipt. Surprisingly very few people wished for a copy to be emailed to them, most skipped over this.
It was a very fast process, our line never got backed up and we were able to keep it constantly moving. The only issue really was that with so many guests all logging onto our WiFi the moment they came in our door, it slowed our connection down for all our laptops and iPads. The only other confusion was that a lot of guests didn't understand signing with their finger, they kept asking for a pen and I'd have to explain that you sign with your finger!
Once the ticket selling time was complete, we retired one of the iPads. The second iPad was then taken to our Information Booth where people could buy single beer tickets or t-shirts. Once again it was very easy pricing - $20 a shirt, and $4 a single beer ticket. I noted the time that we switched out so I knew at the end of the night that everything we sold after 2:30 would be either a shirt or single beer ticket.
That night, after the event, I logged into BBMS and pulled the transactions for the day, filtering by MobilePay transactions. It pulled a list of all MobilePay transactions which I exported to Excel. I then added additional fields to the Excel sheet to put in quantity sold per transaction. So I added a ticket field, a non-drinker ticket field, a t-shirt field and a single beer ticket field. I wrote in quantity ($55 would be a ticket and a non-drinker ticket) and was able to tally all of our totals relatively quickly. I then input those into Altru using a dummy payment of Other>MobilePay that I had created to track anything sold through MobilePay. That way our Accounting offices would always know that those sales came through MobilePay and not directly through Altru. It kept everything very clean and because it was entered into Altru the same day it was sold and processed by BBMS, all of our records reconciled.
MobilePay was a very easy process. It was very similar to Square, which we used a year ago for our outdoor Pirate Festival. We do plan to use MobilePay again. A word of advice: make sure that whoever uses it, immediately adds the numbers into Altru at the end of the event because otherwise it will throw off Finance if it was processed through BBMS on a different day than it shows on all the Altru sales and revenue reports. I think it will be even faster next time because we have installed WiFi throughout our entire Museum and are upgrading our bandwidth. Our WiFi actually extends outside our Museum to some of our outdoor event spaces as well, and we have a hotspot for places our WiFi won't reach so it will be very helpful for outdoor events as well.
You can check out our page for more images of the event itself.
- Audrey McAbee
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ARCHIVED | Blackbaud Altru® Tips and Tricks
09/16/2014 9:35am EDT
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