Monday, May 30, 2016

Automatically Enhance the Audience Experience with At-The-Venue

Since 2014, InstantEncore's mobile suite has enabled performing arts organizations to enhance the audience experience with event-specific content released within their mobile app on the day of the performance.

Our new At-The-Venue (ATV) feature uses automation tools to make this easier than ever before. With At-The-Venue, you can automatically generate an ATV experience for every event in your calendar AND identify specific content to be included in every ATV experience.

ATV's automation tools help you to consistently enhance the audience experience for every event, amplify the relevancy of your app for patrons, and save staff time by reducing app management tasks

Sync ATV with Your Events


Prior to the release of At-The-Venue, app administrators needed to manually create experiences for events on their calendar. Now, you can synchronize the creation of ATV experiences with Events in your app.  And all it takes is the click of a button!

Click on image for a closer look
  • In your account, go to Mobile >> At-The-Venue
  • In the Checklist on the right, click on Sync with Events
  • Click on the Enable Sync button
Once you enable the sync, an ATV experience will be generated for each upcoming Event. The follow items will be automatically included in the experience:

Monday, May 9, 2016

10 Tips for Managing Geofences - Connecting When and Where It Counts

Geofences allow you to create location-based triggers around your venue. Think of it as putting a ring around your theater, concert hall, museum or other venue. When your patrons cross the geofence ring, they receive a customized message on their phone prompting them to open your mobile app.

Here are 10 tips for maximizing the effectiveness of your geofences:

Getting Started


Create one single Geofence.
1. Keep it Simple.
There will always be some give and take with determining a user’s location. Especially when considering all of the technologies and factors that go into it. As an example, avoid placing one Geofence around your venue, another around the parking lot next door, and a third one for the coffee shop across the street with which you have a partnership.

Even if a user parks in the lot and grabs a cup of coffee across the street before heading into the event, they might end up receiving the event notification first, then one for the coffee shop, and lastly for the parking lot at which point they’re already in your lobby.

TIP: Use one Geofence to surround everything and then supply parking and coffee shop information as part of the At-The-Venue (ATV) Experience content.

2. Encompass the Entire Venue. And a Little Bit More.
The size of your Geofence is important. The minimum diameter is 200 meters (or about 650 feet) which will cover most small to medium sized venues. Increase the size as needed to cover larger venues. But don’t make it too big as users who have the App might receive a message even though they are not attending the event.

TIP: First, adjust your Geofence so that the entire venue is inside of it. Then expand it to add some buffer room. An extra 50 to 100 meters wouldn’t be unreasonable.

3. Managing Multiple Venues.
A single venue is easy. Create your Geofence, set an Any Time or ATV message, and you’re done! But for our partners who present at different venues, Custom Messages are key.

TIP: You can use these to create time-specific messages at each Geofence for each event. This will help you avoid sending messages to people if they happen to arrive at a location when you don’t have an event going on there. You can also mix-and-match. Setup a main Geofence with an Any Time message and Geofences for special venues with only Custom Messages.

Monday, May 2, 2016

Introducing 4 New Features Now Available for Your Mobile App

InstantEncore is continually improving our mobile solutions platform so that we can deliver maximum benefit to arts organizations and their patrons.  This week, we're releasing four exciting, new features for your mobile app.

1. Automated At-The-Venue Experiences




Creating At-The-Venue Experiences (or ATVs) are a powerful way to connect with your patrons. Your ATV can prompt them to check-in on social media, deliver program information, showcase upcoming events, present them with promotional offers, and more.

And now, it's easier than ever to create an At-The-Venue Experience. Every time you add an event in your account, you automatically generate an ATV for that event, and schedule it to appear in your app on the day of the event.

Managing At-The-Venue content is easier, too.  If you have content that you'd like in all your ATVs, you can set it up once and have it automatically added to any Experiences you create.  You can also copy existing content from other ATVs in your account.

And of course, you retain the ability to add custom content to specific Experiences or create new ATVs from scratch at any time.