The best way to get started with Lotteries, is actually to start creating the Products that you would like to award to the winners. That tutorial goes beyond the scope of this article, but there are some considerations to be touched upon when creating a Product for Lotteries.
In the Product Basic Settings there is a field called Product Date. This allows you to associate a date with this specific product that can link it to a Lottery associated with a reward on that specific day. This makes it so that an attendee with a Saturday Badge can’t enter a lottery and win a reward that is only available on Friday.
Note: If this field is left blank it is automatically considered to be associated with all days of the event. It is not possible to associate a Product with only multiple select days of the event (i.e. Friday and Saturday, but not Sunday). It is either one specific day, or the entire event.
As mentioned in Lotteries Overview, there are three types of lotteries that can be used. These types are chosen when the Lottery is created, and cannot be changed later for that particular Lottery.
Next, head to the Product Lotteries navigation option, under Products. This will land you on the Lottery Index Page.
On the Lottery Index page, you will see a list of all previously created Lotteries that are organized, by default, chronologically according to their selected Start Date. There is a gray gear icon in the top of the page that allows you to make some important configurations on the system.
Clicking on Settings will bring you to the Lottery Settings page, where you will see these following options:
Both of the Override options allow you to rename portions of the system. Many of our clients would like to use their own terminology to avoid the use of the word Lottery or they call their Admissions something else. This allows the client to be consistent in their communication to their attendees.
Queue-It is a system that Leap Event Technology uses to control the traffic and flow of Attendees to high-demand, high-traffic sites. The configuration of Queue-It is beyond the scope of this article.
Please contact your Account Manager or Client Support if you believe your Product Lottery will cause high traffic to your ticketing page. Your Account Manager will set up your Queue and add the Queue It secret to your Product Lottery setup.
The other options in the flyout menu from that gear icon are self-explanatory. You can:
- Create a new lottery
- Go to the front-facing lottery page
- Customize the sorting of lotteries
- Perform exports for the data acquired through Lotteries
To create a new Lottery, and this is the case regardless of which type of Lottery you are building, you can either use the aforementioned gear icon option, or you can click on the blue New Lottery button on the Index Page.
Which brings you to this page. This is an important step because this is where you will decide whether this Lottery is Standard or has the Group features built into it. Reminder, this cannot be changed later, and there is a callout on this page underneath the drop menu stating such.
After naming the Lottery, selecting its type, and clicking Create Product Lottery you are taken to the Edit Page to make the rest of the configurations.
Active: This turns the lottery on or off and makes it visible on the front-facing Lottery page to collect submissions. If this is toggled to yes, this Lottery will be visible on that page regardless of whether it is upcoming, current, or concluded. It is recommended to only toggle the Lottery to Active when work on it is completed.
Start Date/Time and End Date/Time: These settings must both be filled out. This dictates the length of time that the Lottery is open to collect entries. Winners are not automatically awarded at the conclusion of this time frame. That will be covered later.
Title: You can rename the Lottery at will.
Description: This text will be displayed during the Lottery entry process to describe the Lottery.
Validate Admission Ticket: When toggled on, this option forces the system to validate the email address used in the Lottery against email addresses associated with Orders in the system, specifically Orders with Products that have been flagged as an Admission Product in the Product's Basic Settings. If there are no matching orders the user will not be allowed to enter the Lottery.
Disclaimer: This text will be displayed during the Lottery entry process for the end user to agree to.
Email Confirmation Text: This field is used to customize the verbiage contained in the Confirmation Email that is sent to the Lottery entrant.
Form Builder: If a Form is being used as part of this Lottery, this is where that Form (built in Form Builder and described in a separate article) is connected.
Collect Name: By default, Lotteries only collect email addresses to enter. Toggle this option On to also collect First and Last Name.
Wait List: This is where the distinction between Standard and Waitlist Lotteries is defined. They are set up and function identically in almost every other way.
Group Lottery Configuration
Setting up a Group Lottery follows a similar path, with a few notable differences. Click on the New Lottery button, as before, give the Lottery a name, and select Group from the Type dropdown. This brings you to the Group Lottery Edit Page.
Many of the options here are the same as for Standard/Waitlist Lotteries so we can skip those. Going over the new options, we have:
Confirmation Page Text: This allows you to configure the text that displays on the Attendee's Confirmation Page that is related to the Lottery entry.
Lottery Event Date: For now, this feature is only available on the Group Lottery setting, but will be expanded to the Standard/Waitlist options in a future revision. This is the Lottery Event Date selection that should match the Product (mentioned earlier) Event Date. For more context on this feature it makes it so that one customer that has purchased a separate Friday, Saturday, and Sunday Admission is not able to create a group of three and enter this same Lottery.
Max Group Size: This dictates how many Attendees can be part of a Group.
The final two options are related to further refinements and exceptions to the Lottery system. When they are toggled on they open up additional text boxes.