Author: Dan

Multipass is a few things: a ticketing platform, a membership platform, and an attempt to bring humanity to a soulless process. This article is going to be about the ticketing aspect, and some of the ways we have tried to both learn from those that came before us, and to improve on pain points.

The Multipass Motivation

The existing ticketing options left us a bit wanting. Over the years the ticket-buying flow wasn’t that bad, but after experiencing a combination of outrageous service fees with a few missing-or-desired features within the span of a week, we decided we could build something comparable, or better, and more reasonably priced.

Initially we had another much more boring name for the project, but with the proper digging and investment we were able to secure the multipass.com domain, giving us the ability to christen the only ticketing platform on the planet where people smile when they say our name.

Ticketing

You can create events on Multipass and sell tickets to these events. This ability is likely why you’re even interested in our offering. These events can be physical events, or virtual events.

You can sell one ticket type, or multiple types of tickets with different pricing, or you can have free events. We have multiple ways to facilitate entry and validate tickets, but more on that later.

These features are the foundation of our offering, and steer our website and our mobile applications. We also give you a lot more features and options…

Groups

Businesses, organizations, and venues will likely want to create more than a single event. To that end we have created “groups” within our platform.

Groups can be followed (let your audience know about new events!), can have descriptions, terms, waivers, and more. They can also list all of your events, both past and future.

Some businesses have specific needs to comply with legal obligations, and we introduced the option of paid membership to these groups. We’ll dive into that more below, as well as in the next article, but this feature caters to private organizations, after-hours clubs, and any type of collective that wants to both approve and/or charge participants for membership.

Transfers and Shared Tickets

Some events won’t sell out, but many will. People will buy tickets for themselves and for friends. Both of these scenarios invite the need for ticket transfers. Some of these needs can be addressed by assigning a name to a given ticket, but sometimes you’ll want or need more.

We have built three different ways to share tickets. The first one is the one we just mentioned; add a name to a ticket and someone at the door can look it up via a search.

The most common solution would be our second way, to transfer a ticket to someone else. This does not involve any monetary exchange on our side, you simply choose your recipient and the transfer can happen. To transfer a ticket you will need a recipient’s email address.

We realize that we’re in an age where some people use email but many people really don’t, so we’ve added another way as well. In a feature that is unique to Multipass, you can generate a secure one-time claim code and send it to them via text or some kind of instant messenger. Your recipient can click a link you send them, or enter the claim code on our site, and tickets can be transferred without the need for an email address.

We have introduced another unique feature along these lines as well. This is the ability to assign a ticket to someone else without fully transferring it to them. This lets you retain ownership of the tickets but lets someone else pull them up in their own account for door access.

This feature lets you share tickets with friends, but doesn’t give them the ability to transfer or resell them. It also lets you dish out tickets to your friends, including that friend who may or may not show up, and you can retrieve your tickets if they tell you last minute that they can’t make it. After that, assign them again, or transfer or sell them.

We then geared our dashboard towards helping people find what they need the most frequently, or with the greatest urgency. We have been the platform for festivals and there is almost always a rush right before the event where a lot of tickets get transferred. Pending transfers are in your face on the dashboard, giving you full assurance that what you want to have happen is, in fact, happening.

Flexibility

Most events have public ticket sales, but some events will have a more curated list of attendees. Multipass can let you collect contact information from interested parties, letting you easily send unique-code-based invitations to the individuals of your choice. These invites can be time-limited if you want to instill a sense of excitement or urgency.

You can also control your pricing and ticket flow in a number of ways. While it’s not required, you can assign start and end times to specific types of tickets; ie. tier 1 is available for some period of time, then tier 2, and so on.

The Multipass promo code system offers you a lot of additional flexibility. Set up hidden ticket tiers that can only be unlocked with a valid promo code, perhaps within a specific timeframe. Set limits on how many times a promo code can be used. Perhaps it’s a single-use code that you are sending to one specific individual, or giving away in a contest. Maybe it’s a special code that can be used up to ten times, with each purchase eligible to purchase either one or two tickets, but it cuts off when a total of twelve tickets are sold this way. Dream it up, we can help you get there.

You can easily generate a list of single-use codes to manually send to your contact list, or you can upload email addresses and have them sent out automatically. Additionally, send unique codes to all of your group members, or from any other group you manage on Multipass.

Nearly every event has comp tickets and we’ve built a simple way to let you issue these, requiring only an email address or by generating a claim code/link you can send via messenger.

Membership

We mentioned this above, but you can choose to run a group with membership on Multipass. We’ll write more about membership in our next article but here’s a high level view.

People can be asked questions of your choice prior to approval (in a following sense) and automatic managed recurring billing can take place for paid membership levels.

Offer members-only events and have the documentation you need to prove it. Or offer members-only tickets to an event that also has higher priced tickets for the public.

Payment

Our team has been involved in e-commerce for a long time and we believe in establishing and following best-practices for information and credit card security.

At this time we are using a hosted checkout system based on Stripe.com. This affords us, and you, amazing peace of mind. The payment page is hosted on Stripe’s servers and all we ever see are tokens that are linked to single transactions. We don’t ever touch card numbers.

This leaves the security of your payment information in the hands of a company whose entire business is to manage and protect it. We are PCI-compliant because we are working with one of the best PCI-compliant payment processors.

Physical cards and check-in

One of the worst feelings is having your tickets on your phone and waiting in line with 1% left on your phone battery, wondering if you’ll get through the scanner before your phone dies. One option is to print out your tickets at home, bringing that QR code with you. We have another option that is unique to our Multipass platform…

Individuals can get physical Multipass access cards that they can pair to their accounts. Scanning these cards (featuring unique QR codes as well as unique tappable NFC codes) at the door can unlock your tickets, battery-free! Our API lets ambitious developers leverage these cards for their own purposes as well, with the cards functioning as personal identifiers for those who choose to have them. Rig up your venue to let people change the light color, or background music, based on your integration.

Groups can get custom Multipass cards printed as well. While these cards will work for any Multipass-ticketed event, you can generate intangible loyalty and feel-goods by issuing your own co-branded cards. To access one of your events, people can pull out their phones, their printouts, or they can proudly whip out the access card that they got for being part of your group.

Finally, in the spirit of the way things have been done since forever, we have the ability to find people by name. While we have a way to give you a printout of names, we also have a more modern way to accomplish the same. On both our website (desktop and mobile) and our mobile app we have a look up feature. As you start to type someone’s name it searches the ticketholder as well as any assigned names, and filters the list down to possible matches. A few keystrokes and you’re looking through a list of five names instead of hundreds or thousands. This has been amazingly effective at streamlining or eliminating lines at the doors to events.

More to Come

This is a good glimpse at what we can offer on the ticketing side. Our next article will discuss how to use Multipass for your membership groups, whether or not you need ticketing.

On top of that, we have an exciting list of new things we’re planning to add. Some of these will be on the ticketing side, some on the membership side, and some will be relevant but as-off-yet-undisclosed new offerings.

Thanks for checking out what we can do, and if you have ways you’d like to see our system evolve we’d love to hear from you!

At Multipass we care about the state of ticketing. I mean, it’s what we do, but we also buy tickets to events that are on other platforms. Recently, one of the big players has been in the news.

Ticketmaster has been the most familiar name in ticketing for a long time now. They service the biggest venues in North America and don’t have a lot of competition in that space. Big venues have dedicated ticketing scanning hardware (more than just a barcode scanner) and that’s an investment. They are locked into contracts that span years. Changing these sorts of things is not inexpensive, nor without effort and commitment.

Thirteen years ago (2009) Ticketmaster took another step and merged with LiveNation, one of the largest event promoters in the country. Having a lock on both the shows and the tickets gave them a one-stop monopoly. This has given them a way to charge exorbitant service fees and there’s nothing the consumer can do about it. If you want to see a specific show then you have to pony up both the ticket price and the fees.

Recently they made news when their infrastructure failed to keep up with the demand for Taylor Swift’s new tour. People were experiencing multiple charges with no tickets to show, losing tickets that were supposedly being held in their cart, or simply being unable to use the site at all. A month before that, Ticketmaster made waves with an experimental pricing feature that was inspired by surge pricing on Uber, where the price varies based on supply and demand. Blink 182 tickets when on sale and shoppers were staring down rates of over $600. Either of these would have been bad publicity, but both happening in rapid succession certainly has people talking, with a buzz building about breaking up their monopoly.

The only competitor in the big venue space is AXS. If a big venue is not on Ticketmaster, it’s likely on AXS. They also run and promote events, sometimes also owning the host venues. They control shows and fees, like Ticketmaster, and in both cases the fees are steep. For AXS and Ticketmaster shows, service fees seem to start at 25% and have been as high as 50%, and this is on top of the ticket price.

Ticket prices themselves vary. Some seem palatable, more so with AXS, but tickets to most Ticketmaster shows are themselves massively priced, and that’s only speaking to tickets sold directly from Ticketmaster to buyers. Once we get into the scalper market, prices double, triple, or more. There are various avenues for purchasing aftermarket tickets, but Ticketmaster does have one of its own and, you guessed it, big fees. It’s a vague and nebulous topic, but there are accounts of how Ticketmaster may be giving priority ticket access to buyers who intend to purchase the bulk of available tickets. Ticketmaster will make their fee on the original sale, then another fee on the resale.

The ticket-buying process isn’t bad, but it’s not great. You have to make a free account on Ticketmaster in order to do anything. If all you want is one ticket to one show, make an account. Generally, the flow is okay. You choose your seat, if applicable, then you buy your tickets. These days you also have to wade through a handful of additional offers, most of which you’ll never care about or use.

The current leader in the next tier of events is EventBrite. For mid-sized and small events they are the current most popular offering. They’re doing a lot of things right and haven’t alienated nearly as many people as Ticketmaster , but sometimes their fees are still high and there are many types of legal events that they opt not to ticket as part of their policy. There are other smaller platforms that have some level of traction at events I see here in Denver. There truly are a lot of events and there are a lot of ticketing opportunities.

There is also a home in the ticketing space for us here at Multipass. We listened to event producers and tried to address the pain points we heard. We have a streamlined checkout process, with accounts being completely optional. Our fees are extremely competitive, charging 80-90% less than Ticketmaster while also having our stated figure account for credit card charges.

Our tagline is “Experience Humanity”. This refers to the events that people are creating, and sharing their own passions with you, but also applies to the ticketing process itself. We want to help you get to know more about event producers via blog posts and short videos, and we want the ticketing process to feel personal. If you call us we want you to talk with a human. If you have questions, we can help you set up your events. Multipass donates 5% of all service fees collected (gross, not just from our profit) to worthy causes, starting with the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation which focuses on mental health research and treatment.

Could we have handled the Taylor Swift ticket drop? Since the biggest in the world couldn’t handle it, it would be foolish to say that we’d have done better. That said, there are other ways to handle events with huge drops (waiting rooms, lottery, ticket drop staggered by city), and advising on that strategy would have been part of our offering. We would have also scaled up our infrastructure, just like all quality sites do at times of pre-anticipated need. That said, we’re not going for those venues, nor are we servicing a world tour for one of the planet’s most popular musicians.

Quality experiences and personal service, join us as we try to put humanity back into event ticketing.

We are thrilled to have been the ticketing provider for three regional/renegade Burn events in Colorado in 2022. As a Colorado business with members who are part of these communities, we understand useful-and-required features coupled with frustrations with high service fees on most ticketing platforms. We wanted to offer a better solution.

Colorado Burnal Equinox

Upon launching Multipass, our first live event was the Colorado Burnal Equinox (CBE). Their ticketing needs were pretty basic: collect money, allow transfers, print out a list that could be checked offline in an area without internet. We had this functionality, and much more.

Our event producers and participants loved the ease of use and the reponsivness of the platform developer of Multipass and plan to use it again.

CBE Lead

This was a small event, and the ticketing process was successful. We listened to feedback and built reports and features whenever something came up that wasn’t yet built.

Elsewhence

After TTITD, we ticketed the Elsewhence burn event, a significantly larger event than CBE. Reporting needs were higher, transfers were critical (and plentiful!), and we worked with their ticketing lead to deliver a solid experience.

“Ticket to Elsewhence purchased and it was positively seamless. Way better than Brown Paper Tickets!”

— Elsewhence 2022 Customer

Ticket sales spiked in the first minute of availability and the Multipass system didn’t break a sweat. Elsewhence set up various ticket types, some of which were protected by unique codes. Their approach to ticket pricing was to offer a fixed price that included all fees as this kept it simple and clean for buyers. We have three pricing options and this was one of them. They cut transfers off at an announced time and then ran their gate entry from a printed list as well. This event also went off without a hitch.

In supporting the last-minute ticket transfer scramble we learned a few things, listened to feedback from buyers and recipients, and used that feedback to improve our system. The goals are always to streamline everything and we care about your feedback! The founder of Elsewhence was thrilled with this experience and our customer service, offering to pitch us to another large regional with whom they have an affiliation.

Decompression

Denver DeCOmp 2022 was the largest of the three. Hosted at Reelworks, this annual event had multiple quantity-limited pricing tiers, each dropping on a certain schedule. They also used our app for scanning tickets at the door, and this went extremely well. Our lead developer worked the door for much of the event and, while the Multipass system worked as designed, he saw opportunities to enhance the event management process.

With goals of keeping the buying and entry process as smooth as possible a few more enhancements were made (specifically auto-generated QR codes for purchasing events both with and without promotion codes baked in), and the completion of our door sales functionality with the app. DeCOmp used web sales, even at the door, and a few changes could have provided a better experience for people who didn’t have advance tickets.

[Multipass software engineer] Dan was great and put in lots of extra hours to help us make sure things ran smoothly leading up to and at the event. We look forward to working with Multipass again in the future

Sante – Event Lead, Denver DeCOmp

We met with DeCOmp after the event to debrief and this resulted in the creation of our best-practices article. In it were suggestions for streamlining the door experience, and for working with volunteers. Additionally, while at the event, we spoke with a volunteer coordinator as well as a seasoned volunteer and got wonderful feedback about expectations, accountability, tracking, and coordination. Features resulting from these conversations will find their way into our upcoming product offerings.

More Burn Event Ticketing Features

In addition to the features we have listed above, we have some other features that we’ve added for these kind of events:

• Physical tickets: basic, designed, holograms, numbered, fancy.
• Optional required mailing address (required for physical tickets)
• Name required for each ticket, starting at the time of sale
• Name required on tickets to receive transfer
• Agree to event terms and conditions at the time of sale or transfer receipt
• Event information page available only to ticket holders
• Communicate last-minute details/changes by email or text
• Fixed- or variable-priced add-ons for things like art donations, parking, etc
• Advance interest signup
• Require accounts prior to signup or don’t, your call
• Immediate partial payouts for established events
• Support for USD, CAD with EUR coming soon!

There’s a lot more to our system, of course, but these are some of the highlights for this kind of event.

Lots More to Come!

CBE has chosen to use Multipass again for its 2023 event. Elsewhence has indicated the same for 2023, as has DeCOmp. We’re honored to support our local artistic events and welcome feedback and any suggestions that can help our platform assist you in your event coordination.

Header Image: Center Camp presented by Camp Be, shot by Brandy Ultra

In addition to scanning tickets via Multipass you can also sell tickets at the door. This page will show you through how to do that.

Set Up Available Ticket Types

The first thing to do is to set up which of your ticket types are available for door purchase. You can have various levels of promotional tickets, pre-sale priced, or VIP level tickets, that you might not want to sell at the door.

In the website admin on each ticket level there is a toggle that will let you choose whether to present these for purchase at the door. See “Allow Door Sales” in this image:

In most cases there will be a single type of ticket available at the door. If you need more then make to set the toggle on each of them. You can have as many ticket types as you’d like but having six or fewer will streamline the door flow.

Set Up Door Payment Types

Once you’ve enabled your ticket types to be available for door sales, you can enable door sales for the whole event. In the web admin, go to Manage your event, then select Payment from the subnavigation.

You’ll see a toggle to allow door sales. When you enable that you will also see a list of possible payment methods. Enable the ones that you wish to accept. These payment methods include: cash, check, Venmo, comp tickets, or external credit. For external credit that means you’re providing your own credit card swiping solution like Square. Lower in this article we’ll talk about enabling integrated credit cards (the smoothest way!!) so keep reading if that’s part of your plan.

That’s all of the advance preparation you need if you want to sell tickets at the door using external payment methods.

Door Sales In The App

To sell tickets at the door, open the Multipass app. Go to ‘Scan’ on the bottom menu. If you have the right permissions then you will see your event listed. (Note: event creators and designated event managers can see the event under ‘scan’). When you select your event the app will enter scanning mode. On the bottom right there’s a button that says “Door”. Select that to access the “Door Sales” screen.

You will be presented with the list of ticket types that you set up earlier. All ticket quantities default to zero at this time. Use the plus and minus buttons to adjust your ticket count accordingly and click Next.

The next screen will show you the total that will be charged, including any fees, as well as a list of possible payment types. Please note that you are responsible for collecting any of the offline payment types. If you select “cash” then you must collect the cash, and so on. The only payment type we can specifically capture for you is the integrated credit (more on this below).

You must choose one of the available payment methods in order to proceed. Once you choose a payment method, the “Continue” button will appear. Press the “Continue” button and the system will record the tickets as sold and increase the value collected for your reporting.

You will see the Success screen. Press “Ok” to return to the main door ticket sales screen and you can repeat this process.

Integrated Credit Card Sales

Processing credit cards via the Multipass app is possible and requires a couple more setup steps. Since we have reduced risk of chargebacks as well as reduced customer support we can offer lower rates at the door as well as being able to send the money directly to your own Stripe account.

There are two extra steps involved. The first involves copying a couple values from your Stripe account and the second involves setting up a location that Stripe will use. Both of these steps are pretty straightforward.

Copy and Paste the Stripe API Keys

On the same payment screen from above, you’ll see a section called “Integrated Credit Cards”. There are fields for Secret Key and Publishable Key. We need to get those values from Stripe.

Next, log into your Stripe account. If you have never done anything with your API Keys before they might be presented to you on the front page but you can access the values by going to https://dashboard.stripe.com/apikeys. You can also get there by clicking the Developers button (top right) and selecting API Keys from the left menu.

If you click on the publishable key it will be copied to your clipboard. Paste that value into your other Multipass browser tab in the Publishable Key field. Do the same with the secret key value. The secret key will only let you do this once. If you need to do this again in the future you can click the “…” link on the right and “Roll Key” to reset it. Once both values are pasted into Multipass, click the green Save button.

Set Up Stripe Location

The last thing we have to do is let Stripe know where you’ll be when you swipe cards. This is a fraud prevention measure. If this is the first time you’re setting this up then you’ll click the toggle to set up a location.

When you click this you will see additional fields. They will be prepopulated with any location information you have already entered for your event. Edit these fields with proper values and click Save.

You can now enabled “Integrated Credit Cards” as a door payment method for your event and you won’t have to jump through these hoops again when you make your next event.

Acquiring and Pairing Swiper

You will need one more thing, a compatible device that can read credit cards. We have built this to use the Stripe Reader M2 device. If you are near a Multipass office or representative we have some we can provide to you on a temporary basis. Alternatively, if you are running multiple events it makes sense to get your own which you can start here: https://stripe.com/terminal/stripe-reader

After you have entered your Stripe API Keys, set up a location, and enabled integrated cards, you will be able to select Integrated Credit Cards as an option on your Payment screen. Once you do that it will also show up in the app as a payment option.

In the app, the first time you select “Door” with this enabled, it will prompt you to allow the app to use Bluetooth. Please grant this permission. It will then seek out the device and pair it. Make sure the swiper is either plugged in or fully charged.

Now, when going through the door flow, you can select Integrated Credit Card and the swiper will automatically move you through the flow when it has collected card information. It can read a chip card, read a tap, or use the magnetic stripe on a card.

Multipass is Here to Help

Questions or comments on this process? Our team is happy to assist in getting your devices ready for your event. Reach out!