We will introduce you to the Guest and Anonymous User feature and how you can incorporate it into your events to increase the engagement as well as providing new opportunities for you to reach a wider audience and convert hesitant users into fully fledged attendees into buying a ticket.
In this article, we will cover:
- Overview of Guest and Anonymous access
- How to control access options
- How to customize the login experience for your Guests and Anonymous Users
- How to tailor permissions for your Guests and Anonymous Users
- How to manage guests and anonymous users
- Known gaps and limitations
- FAQs
Overview of access options
Guest Access
A Guest user is a non-authenticated user. Guests will be able to log in with a valid email address. Validity simply means that the email address is in an acceptable format and does not need to be verified or real.
Anonymous User
An Anonymous User is a non-authenticated user. Anonymous users do not have to provide any email address to log in.
What can these new types of users do?
These user types come with special properties that differentiate them from existing user types that you may be familiar with. A Guest data type allows Event Organizers to capture email addresses of potential attendees whilst an Anonymous User data type lowers the barrier even further by not requesting for any contact information at all.
We are also introducing a new permission option for some of the actions a user can take. Instead of simply allowing or disallowing a user type from taking a specific action, Event Organizers can decide to entice guests and anonymous users with previews of part of Grip and automatically prompt them to buy tickets if they want to see or do more.
How to control access options?
Guests and Anonymous Users will be able to log in only if the event organizer enables either login setting for their Event. Contact Grip staff members to turn on or off your Application access settings.
Do you have an application with SSO-enabled login? Refer to the FAQ for details
How to customize the login experience for your Guests and Anonymous Users
When determining the login settings, each Event’s settings inherit from the Application’s setting. A few other key points to note are:
- Turning off access at the app level turns it off for all events in the application and vice-versa
- Modifying the event settings will break this inheritance until the next time an app level change takes place
- Once turned off, any existing affected users will be forced to log out
- Guest and Anonymous User settings will be included during event copying
For Guest and Anonymous Users access to be enabled, you will need to provide URLs to your privacy policy, terms & conditions, and optionally, your imprint statement. You cannot delete your privacy policy or terms & conditions URLs once any of these access modes is switched on.
Customizing the' Buy A Ticket' prompt for your Guests and Anonymous users
When either login option is enabled, further information is required to complete the set up. Event Organizers will need to provide the prompt for Guests and Anonymous Users for when they take actions that are blocked by your permissions settings. These prompts have multilingual support and can be customized per event.
If your event doesn’t have an option to register or purchase a ticket, then you may leave it empty so that the prompt will show up without an option to do so.
Once configured, they will look similar to the following examples for your Guests and Anonymous Users.
On web:
On mobile:
How to tailor permissions for your Guests and Anonymous Users
Guests and Anonymous Users will have a more restrictive set of permissions made available to them compared to regular users.
In addition to the standard “Yes” or “No” permissions for taking an action, Event Organizers can also choose instead to prompt these users to register/buy a ticket when they take an action that is not available to them.
This permission will then trigger the previously configured prompt to show up for the Guest or Anonymous User when they attempt to take the action.
The following permissions are available for prompting Guests or Anonymous Users:
- Ability to edit their own availability calendar
- Ability to edit their own profile
- Ability to view profiles of a particular User Type
- Ability to see matchmaking recommendations of a particular User Type
- Ability to see sessions of a particular track
- Ability to join sessions of a particular track
The following permissions are not available for Guests and Anonymous Users:
- Ability to form connections or chat with any other User Type
- Ability to be met by any other User Type
- Ability to meet any other User Type*
- Ability to be recommended to any other User Type
- Ability to be viewed by any other User Type
- Ability to be searched by any other User Type
- Ability to create teams or join teams
- Ability to scan badges or receive badge scans
What other features are not available to Guests and Anonymous Users?
- Ability to join Groups
- Ability to join Speed Networking
- Ability to experience Onboarding
- Ability to set a password or change their email address
- Receive emails (subject to future releases)
How to manage guests and anonymous users
You can manage Guests and Anonymous Users in the Grip Dashboard in a similar fashion to regular Data Types. You can search, filter and sort through your list of profiles and view each profile in detail. Additionally, you can perform the following set of actions on each profile:
- Change the data type of the profile, i.e. moving them from a Guest or Anonymous User type to a regular user type
- Review their user activity data
- Reset their recommendations or create a manual recommendation swipe
- Remove the profile from an event or application
- Add the profile to a session
With Guests, we also provide a new export file of known conversions of Guests into regular users. This export tracks when we detect a change in a profile’s change from the Guest data type to another type.
Known gaps and limitations
Permissions
The UI for some of the permissions management options will be improved over time.
Demographic information
Custom profile fields can be edited by guests if the Event Organizer chooses to enable the fields for Guests and Anonymous Users. However, no one can see them except an Event Organizer and these are a good source of demographic data for the event.
Event Access and Experience
Regular users will continue to have access as guests after an Event Organizer disables Guest access. Manual removal from the event by an Event Organizer is required.
Guests cannot change their email addresses by themselves at this time. A future update will allow for this.
Privacy and Security
There are some use cases that will cause guest login to halt in order to prevent a security breach of a full user’s account by a bad actor. The following illustrates such an example:
A person was registered for an event last year but did not show up and never activated their account. Now they have returned and are interested in this year’s event and try to enter as a guest but fails.
To prevent any data breach of this user’s account information, the event organizer needs to take any of the following three options.
- Add the user as regular user to this year’s event and send a welcome email
- Remove the user from the previous event and let the user enter as a guest in this year’s event
- Delete the thing record completely and let the user enter as a guest
FAQs
Management
Q: Can I enable Guest or Anonymous User access in my Application?
A: At present, you will need to reach out to your Grip staff contact person to enable it for your Application. Once enabled, you can then manage it independently for each of your events.
Q: Can I enable Guest or Anonymous User access in my MustMeet event?
A: Yes. Although there are no restrictions, we do recommend that you only enable this during your Open Networking phase.
Q: Can I call these new user types something else?
A: You can change the display name of a Guest or Anonymous User type but guests and anonymous users will not appear in regular users’ view/experience.
Login, SSO and Registration
Q: My Application is SSO protected. Will I be able to enable Guest or Anonymous User access?
A: Yes. Guest and Anonymous User access will be compatible with SSO enabled apps.
Q: My Application is SSO protected and I want guests to sign in only using my SSO. How can I do this?
A: You can set up Guest Login by disabling the “Guests can bypass my Application's SSO” option when configuring Guest access.
Q: My Application is SSO protected but I do not need guests to sign in only using my SSO. How can I do this?
A: You can set up Guest Login by enabling the “Guests can bypass my Application's SSO” option when configuring Guest access.
Q: Does this mean that there will be guest records in Grip that are not present in my SSO records?
A: Yes. This effectively means that you may have different user records on Grip and your own system.
Q: My Application uses Grip Registration or Grip Sign Ups. Will I be able to enable Guest or Anonymous User access?
A: Guest and Anonymous User access will be compatible with Grip Registration and Grip Sign Ups.
Q: What does a valid email address mean for Guests?
A: Guests will be able to log in with a valid email address. Validity simply means that the email address is in an acceptable format and does not need to be verified or real.
Q: Why don’t you verify that guest email addresses are real email addresses?
A: Introducing a verification step will raise the barrier of entry into your event.
User Experience for Guests and Anonymous Users
Q: Will Guests or Anonymous Users be able to see the onboarding experience?
No. Guest and Anonymous Users will not experience Onboarding.
Q: What happens when I turn off Guest or Anonymous User access?
A: Guests and Anonymous Users will be able to log in only if the Event Organizer enables either login setting for their event. Once turned off, any existing affected user type will be forced to log out and no new Guests or Anonymous Users can log in again.
Q: I have a guest in one event that is also a regular user in another event. What happens to access then?
A: Guests who are regular users in another event will continue to retain access to the “guest” event. Event Organizers will need to remove the user from the event from the Grip Dashboard.
Q: Will Guests and Anonymous Users receive emails?
A: No. emails cannot be sent to these users.
Q: Will Guests and Anonymous Users see Ads, Promotions, or Sponsors?
A: Yes. Guests and Anonymous Users will be able to see them.
Q: Can Guests and Anonymous Users join sessions?
A: Yes if you set the permissions for them to do so. Guests and Anonymous Users will count towards any attendance limits that you have set.
User Experience for Regular Users
Q: Can regular users see Guests and Anonymous Users?
A. No. Regular users can only see the other regular user profiles that are configured in their permission settings
Q: Can Teams users see Guests and Anonymous Users?
A. No. Teams users can only see the other regular user profiles or inbound leads and contacts that are configured in their permission settings
Q: Do Guests and Anonymous user actions (profile views, sponsored sessions, team interaction, etc) get tracked as inbound leads for Teams?
A: No. Only regular user actions will continue to be tracked as inbound leads
Q: Will Guests and Anonymous Users appear in search results?
A: No. Guests and Anonymous Users will never appear in search results.
Q: Can I add a Guest or Anonymous Users to my meeting?
A: No, Guests and Anonymous Users cannot be added to meetings
Analysis and Insights
Q: How will I know how many Guests and Anonymous Users I have?
A: You can see an all time list of Guests in the Grip Dashboard. And you can see a list of Anonymous Users that have been created up to 48 hours in the past.
Q: How can I find out how many Guests or Anonymous Users have decided to buy a ticket?
A: We track these conversion actions of each user. Although these do not include the full ticket purchase journey, you can expect to see data on user clicks and converted user rates.