Webhooks open up a whole host of opportunities to streamline your workflows and to increase efficiencies within your organisation. If you’re not too familiar with webhooks, this article will take you through the basics.
Even after reading all about webhooks, you may be still wondering how you can utilise all the benefits that come with them. With this in mind, we’ve put together a workshop style exercise that you can do with your team to identify potential implementations.
Systems Audit
The first thing that we recommend you do is to sit down and map out all the systems your organisations use in conjunction with Ticketsolve. Below is an example of what your systems map could look like:
Once you have built a picture of all your systems, it will get you to start thinking about whether or not a connection between Ticketsolve and those systems would be beneficial. Take for example Slack; as you can see from the map above, Slack is used by many of the teams within that organisation. This could prompt us to start thinking about potentially integrating Ticketsolve with Slack through Webhooks. Another one is Google Sheets, as most of the departments use this system, it may make sense to see how integrating Ticketsolve with that system would make a difference to the organisation.
Workflows Audit
Once your systems map is complete, the next thing to think about is all the manual processes you have in place when it comes to tasks that you do in relation to Ticketsolve. Incorporate all processes from every team that comes into contact with Ticketsolve. Below we have given you some examples that your different teams could add:
- Marketing - Every time a show is about to sell out we always send out social posts to notify everyone that we only have a few tickets remaining.
- Box Office - The person who manages group bookers has to always keep an eye for any large bookings. When a group does book, the person who takes the booking will send an email to their colleague with information about that group.
- Finance - Every morning someone logs into Ticketsolve to download a report so that they can manipulate the data and enter it into the finance system.
- Management - Management wants a daily email from the box office that highlights what was sold yesterday.
- Development - Development have to login to Ticketsolve and pull a report to find who has donated recently.
The above are just some basic examples, but it gives you a picture of what your organisations do and it will start getting you to think about if you could utilise Ticketsolve features or webhooks to automate a lot of these tasks. We would recommend each team going away and building their own workflow audit and once each team has completed it, coming together as a team to discuss the overall picture.
Can Webhooks Help
With the systems and workflow audit complete you can start to think about how webhooks could potentially step in to automate some of your workflows and connect Ticketsolve to your other systems. As an example, we will take some of the systems and workflows noted above to show you how webhooks can help you become more efficient.
Real Examples
As this is the main communication tool in this organisation, it makes sense to integrate Ticketsolve using webhooks. It will allow you to automatically post information into Slack when something happens in Ticketsolve. Take for example the Development workflow above, they have to login to Ticketsolve to find out when someone donates.
What if you could automatically push a message into Slack everytime a customer donates over £10. Well, you can! You can connect Ticketsolve to Slack and it will automatically push a notification into the fundraising channel everytime this trigger occurs. You can even bring in dynamic content such as the customer name, the order number, how much they donated etc… Another example could be the group booking box office person. They could set up a Slack notification everytime someone books over 20 tickets in an order, or books the group booking ticket price.
Xero is the main financial system used by this organisation so it would make sense to try and integrate it with Ticketsolve. Instead of having the finance team having to pull reports from Ticketsolve and then upload that CSV file to Xero, let webhooks automatically send the data into Xero without any manual intervention.
Next Steps
Once you have completed the systems and workflow audit, it should give you a really good picture of your organisation's processes. You are now in a position to start thinking about integrating Ticketsolve with those other systems to improve efficiencies and make your organisation work smarter, not harder.
Take a look at the data payload examples article as that will give you an idea of what data you can pull out of Ticketsolve via the webhooks. If you already know what data you can pull, you can move straight onto integrating Ticketsolve with your other systems.
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