Brushfire

Summary

• Brushfire’s clients are always looking for new ways to engage attendees and increase sales at events. Brushfire needed a way to make all these purchases happen seamlessly.
• Brushfire was able to create a cohesive payments and reporting solution for the first time, by integrating Square for in-person, in-app, and online payments.
• The first client to leverage the omnichannel solution Brushfire built on Square’s platform saw a 22% lift in re-registrations at their largest event of the year.
• Brushfire now offers their Event App to organizations through Square’s App Marketplace.

A complete platform for large-scale events

Brushfire’s mission is to help churches and nonprofits host amazing events at scale. They do this by providing the best selection of ticketing and registration options for general admission or assigned seating events, and fully-customized e-tickets for scanning every attendee. Their software and client management approach are tailored to the needs of their target audience. This approach has earned them intense loyalty from organizations like Hillsong Church, which relies on Brushfire’s software to enhance their attendees’ onsite experience and reduce the operational burden of managing large-scale events across multiple continents.

One way Brushfire helps clients like Hillsong achieve those goals is by making it easier for attendees to register for the next event while they’re still enjoying the current one. “An event is an experience — everything about it should feel seamless to attendees, including registration,” explained Jorin Slaybaugh, VP Technology at Brushfire.

They wanted to enable this experience via mobile ordering kiosks onsite and through a custom event app attendees download to navigate their event experience. Adding commerce touchpoints like these — while critical to driving revenue — can add complexity to an event operation that already has a lot of moving pieces to manage.

“We wanted a single, cohesive, end-to-end payments solution that would work in our most important geographies,” Slaybaugh recalled. “We used to cobble together multiple payments solutions for an event’s online ticketing, mobile app, and box office to try to deliver that cohesive experience, and it was painful.” That’s when they found Square’s APIs.

Delivering an omnichannel ticketing experience

Brushfire started developing with Square for their box office and online ticket registration, and saw early success with clients. Then, when Square released the In-App Payments SDK, Brushfire’s goal of delivering a seamless omnichannel payments experience was finally complete.

With Square, it’s easy for Brushfire to reconcile sales and customer data from every purchase point. Because they’re using Square across channels, they don’t have to worry about storing or passing card data through their systems—Square facilitates PCI-compliant payments across every part of Brushfire’s integration. Which means their team can focus on delivering a great client and attendee experience, knowing that the payments piece is handled.

For the 2018 Hillsong Conference, Brushfire rolled out their first truly omnichannel payments experience. They created both a custom kiosk app and a mobile event app where, among other things, attendees could register for next year’s conference. Hillsong saw a 22% boost in re-registrations across all channels and, despite only minimal promotion of in-app registrations, 17% of that revenue came through the new mobile app channel.

“From [Hillsong’s] perspective, the limits are off now in terms of growth,” Slaybaugh said after the conference. “We can’t ask for better feedback from a client.”

Expanding their partnership with Square

The limits are off for Brushfire now, too. After the Hillsong Conference success, Brushfire went to work integrating Square into their Event App platform. Other organizations can now create a custom mobile app for their event with a newsfeed, map and venue info, a schedule, gallery, push notifications, and so much more. Their Event App is now available to any Square seller through the Square App Marketplace, so organizations can now connect Brushfire and Square to enhance their event experience!