Patrons

Patrons are the fair's audience — the people who come. It is the marketing asset the fair owns between events, and most fairs have never had one.

What a patron record holds

Name, email, phone, tags, and source.

Tags are yours to define — 2026 fair, carnival armband, volunteer, season pass — and they are what you filter on when you send.

Getting patrons in

Automatically from every ticket purchase. Anyone who buys a ticket online is enrolled. This is the main engine, and it is why ticketing is worth turning on even for an event where you would otherwise take cash at the gate.

A shareable signup link and QR code. Put the QR on a poster at the gate, on the back of the program, on a table tent in the food court. Scanning opens the signup form.

Manual add, for the list somebody has been keeping in a spreadsheet.

Mass email

Send to a filtered segment using the same branded template and merge tags as everything else in the account. Filter by tag, by source, or by which events they attended.

Every send is logged, so you can see who received what.

Send twice a year, not twice a month

The value of this list is that people open it. A fair that emails its patrons in March about entries and in July about tickets keeps that. One that emails monthly does not.

What to do with it

• Announce the entry deadline to last year's exhibitors and attendees.
• Open ticket sales to the people who came last year, before you advertise anywhere else.
• Recruit volunteers and vendors from people who already care about the fair.
• Say thank you after the fair, with the results and the dates for next year.

Still to come

SMS to patrons. The plumbing exists for portal login codes; patron SMS is planned.