How to Set Up a Password-Protected Pre-Sale in ThunderTix
Hi, everyone. My name is Maggie, and I’m a member of the ThunderTix customer support team. Today, I’m going to show you a ThunderTix feature called password-protected pre-sales.
This feature allows you to reward your most loyal fans, members, or donors with access to early tickets. Whether you’re gearing up for a sold-out opening night, launching a new performance series, or promoting a special fundraiser, these pre-sales help create urgency, boost early sales, and build a stronger connection with your customer base.
Let’s get started.
First, I’m going to show you how to set up a password-protected pre-sale on a new event. I’ll also explain how to edit it on an existing event and what it looks like on your public-facing site.
Start in the Events tab, under Event Manager, and click Create Event.
I’m going to fill this out without taking you through every step so we can focus on setting up the pre-sale. Password-protected pre-sales work with general admission, reserved seating, stadium seating, and other seating configurations. It doesn’t matter what type of seating chart you have.
I have my event filled out with the name, performance dates and times, ticket type, event description, picture, and event address. This is Biggles the Musical. He’s my cat.
Next, go down to the other options and click Advanced Date Display Options. This is where you can set up your pre-sale password.
The first setting is the activation date. This represents the date your event goes on sale to the public. The default is the date and time you’re creating the event.
To offer a pre-sale, you must set the activation date to a later date. We’re going to set it to the 29th.
Once you do that, additional options appear. Now that we’ve set our activation date to a future date, we can create a pre-sale announcement.
For the pre-sale announcement, people typically use the event description and add a note at the top explaining that there’s a pre-sale and when tickets go on sale.
Here, I’ve included the event description and added a message that says “Members-only pre-sale,” along with the date tickets go on sale.
You can customize this text. I’ll show you how in another section. You might want to highlight it, increase the font size, or make it bold to emphasize that a pre-sale is taking place.
This is a useful marketing technique because it lets the general public know you have a pre-sale. It encourages people to ask, “How can I access the pre-sale? Do I need to become a member or a donor?”
It’s a way to generate interest in the event before tickets go on sale to the public.
We’ve created our pre-sale announcement. Now we can choose when to display it.
Let’s set it to today. You can choose any date before your event’s activation date.
Once we’ve set the pre-sale announcement, the password-protected pre-sale option appears.
This allows us to create one password to share with the clients or customers we want to give early access to. These might be members or donors. You decide who gets access.
We’re going to set up our pre-sale password here. This is the password your customers will enter to purchase tickets before they go on sale to the public.
Another setting in the Advanced Date Display Options tab is Public Access to Your Event.
If you select Public, visitors can see your event and click on it to learn about the pre-sale. Without the password, they can’t purchase tickets, but they can see that a pre-sale is available.
If you don’t want the public to see the pre-sale, select Semi-Private.
This option gives you a link to the event that you can send to the customers you want to invite to the pre-sale. The event won’t appear on your public site.
If you don’t want the general public to know about the event or the pre-sale before the event goes live, use Semi-Private and email the link to the customers you want to participate.
We’re going to click Finish to create the event.
Next, I’ll show you how to edit this feature after you’ve created your event, whether you want to change the settings or create a password.
Let’s open Biggles the Musical. We’ve already created the event and its performance. Click Public Display.
Here, you can see your event information. Go down to Customizing the Buy Button under the Public Display section. You’ll find the pre-sale announcement and password, and you can edit them.
You can also see the date the pre-sale announcement goes live on your public site.
To customize the announcement, you can make the text larger, bold, or red. I’ll show you how this looks on the site. Making the announcement stand out can help draw attention to your pre-sale.
You can also edit your password here. If you change it, you’ll need to send the new password to everyone you want to give access to the pre-sale.
Another setting to note is Customizing the Buy Tickets Button.
When your event activates and goes on sale to the general public, the button on your public-facing site says “Buy Tickets.” You can customize this wording for your event.
During the pre-sale, before your event activates, the button says “Enter Pre-Sale.” This lets customers know they’re entering a pre-sale intended for a specific group of customers.
Before we look at our public site, we need to go back to Event Information.
When we created this event, we selected Semi-Private and left that setting enabled. This allows you to send a link to specific customers so they can purchase tickets using the pre-sale password. The event doesn’t appear on your public site.
To display it on the public-facing site, select Public.
Let’s check the event on our public site. Go to Public Display Settings and click View Public Display.
Here, you can see Biggles the Musical and the beginning of the pre-sale announcement. Click Read More to view the event description.
The button says “Enter Pre-Sale.” The default “Buy Tickets” button appears when your event goes live.
Let’s enter the pre-sale to see how it works.
This page displays “Password Required” and your pre-sale announcement: “Members-only pre-sale. Tickets go on sale on X date.”
Scroll down to the Enter Password field. Customers can’t get past this screen or purchase tickets without the password.
Let’s enter our password. This takes us to the screen where we can purchase tickets and complete the process before the public sale begins.
That’s how you set up a password-protected pre-sale.
I have one more thing to show you that will be helpful if you choose the Semi-Private option. Let’s return to Event Information.
If you selected Semi-Private, your event isn’t visible to the public. When tickets go on sale, you’ll need to switch the event back to Public and delete the password.
A useful way to remember this is to create a task for yourself.
Go to the top right corner of the screen and click Tasks. Then click the green button to create a task.
We’ll name it “Turn event back to public” and label it “Biggles the Musical.”
Since the event goes live on the 29th, we’ll set the due date to the 29th at 8 a.m.
For the description, we’ll enter “Turn event back to public for general public ticket sales.”
You can select a contact method, such as phone or email. I prefer email because it sends a reminder when the task is due.
You can also select the task’s priority. I’ll choose High because I want to remember to make the event public so customers can buy tickets.
Click Create Task. You’ll see it listed here. This reminder will help you switch the event back to Public if you choose to use Semi-Private for the pre-sale.
That concludes this video about the password-protected pre-sale feature on ThunderTix.
If you have additional questions, please reach out to the ThunderTix customer support team. We’re happy to help.
Thanks so much!