Challenge
We needed a WordPress-based event ticketing system. We selected EventEspresso as it best satisfied a number of critical requirements:
- Integrated with website accounts, ensuring accurate allocation of member vs non-member tickets.
- Correctly collecting details of multiple attendees in a single transaction.
- Flexible and extensible options, such as promotional codes and bulk purchase discounts.
- Flat fee rather than a high percentage of ticket revenue.
- Correct handling of VAT.
These ticket sales needed to be synchronised back into sheepCRM as the source of truth for all contact data.
Implementation
We had already developed middleware for this client linking their WordPress website to sheepCRM, supporting online joining and user authorisation. This middleware was extended to support event transactions from EventEspresso.
It wasn’t enough to just add the ticket to sheepCRM. Our middleware integration:
- Finds or creates a person record in sheepCRM for each attendee in the registration.
- Finds and updates, or creates, an event booking in sheepCRM for the event.
- Finds and updates, or creates, all the ticket and attendee records to match the EventEspresso registration.
EventEspresso automatically calls this middleware whenever a new registration is received.
Results
Our client’s sheepCRM database now has a real-time integration with EventEspresso, ensuring all event-related data is reflected in sheepCRM.
These data can then be used in other contexts, primarily to power Mailchimp campaign segmentation. (We don’t want the market an event to people who have already registered).
Increasing member value
Our client’s membership model is based on organisational memberships.
Any new contacts registering for events are automatically connected to their associated organisation in sheepCRM. We have a separate process to ensure all these contacts are considered as part of that organisation’s membership.
This increases the number of people benefiting from the membership, delivering greater value and improving retention.
Enhancing data quality
Duplicate contacts can come from a variety of sources. Our integration checks for existing contacts based on their email address.
If we find more than one contact for an email address, we raise this as an alert for the team. The associated records can then be reviewed and merged, if appropriate.
Built in resilience
Occasionally an integration run will fail if one of the systems does not respond as intended. We anticipate this and will automatically raise an alert if the synchronisation did not succeed.
We have extended EventEspresso with a simple ‘Send to sheepCRM’ button on each registration. This will retry the synchronisation on demand.
We are careful to check for and update any existing records as part of the process. This avoids creating duplicate records if the synchronisation is run more than once. More specifically, the integration is idempotent.
