SparqFest enables you to create discounts that people can use to make purchases at a discounted rate (or even for free). You configure festival discounts in the “Finance” section under “Discounts”.

A sample listing of discounts in the “Discounts” subsection

What Is a SparqFest Discount?

The first thing you should notice about discounts is that they are not associated with any specific edition. The discounts you create in SparqFest have their own lives independent of any specific edition of the festival. Instead, their life cycle is governed by their validity dates and usage constraints.

When you enter the “Discounts” subsection, you have the ability to filter all the discounts in the system based on whether you are looking for expired or active discounts. The default view shows only active discounts because the full list of all discounts can be huge.

In short, a SparqFest discount is a code that maps to a discount percentage that people can use when buying things from the festival (typically, tickets).

Creating a Discount

You have two options for creating discounts in SparqFest:

• individually
• in bulk

Individual Discount Generation

To create a single discount code, click the “+ create one” button. It will bring up the following dialog:

Your first decision is whether to let SparqFest generate the code or whether you pick one. If you allow SparqFest to generate one, it will randomly generate a code that will be easy to use, but won't be easy to guess. Otherwise, the dialog will ask you to enter a code:

The next step is to define the amount of the discount. We do not currently support fixed discount amounts, just percentages.

After you specify the amount of the discount, you will need to define validity dates and then move onto the usage constraints.

“Total number of uses” means “all uses of the code across all users”. In contrast, “Customer limit” limits how many times an individual user can use the code.

Finally, provide a user-friendly description of the discount that explains what the discount is for and click “Create”.

The new discount code will show up in the list of codes and it will appear in bold (the bold makes it easy to find the code if you had SparqFest automatically generate the code).

Bulk Discount Generation

In some circumstances, you will want to generate many discount codes at once. Our bulk generation feature lets you do this. To start that process, click “++ bulk generate” link. Instead of a dialog, this link brings up a multi-step wizard.

The first step is to provide similar information as you did when you created a single discount. The primary difference is that SparqFest will always generate the codes for bulk discounts.

In the next step, you can indicate whether or not these discounts should be restricted to specific tickets. If you select “No”, then a person can use the discount to purchase any ticket. Otherwise, you can select the tickets for which the discount is valid. 

Finally, you are asked if you want to restrict the discount to specific users. When you say “Yes”, you can choose to limit usage of the discount to creators, jury members, or staff.

Note that you can also restrict discounts you generate individually based on ticket and user after you create the ticket. We simply have to do it at creation time for bulk discounts because you don't want to have to edit each bulk-generated discount individually.

Click the “Generate” button and the system will start generating the codes. When done, you will get a spreadsheet with all the new discount codes. In addition, they discount codes will appear in bold in the list of discounts.