Know Your Guests, Grow Your Relationships: The Power of Galaxy® and Salesforce

Gateway’s Galaxy connectors for Salesforce pair an attraction’s or institution’s ticketing, membership, and transaction data with Salesforce, turning point-of-sale activity into an ongoing guest relationship rich with actionable information. Galaxy captures activity at point of sale, and Salesforce then uses this information to create a unified Guest 360 profile by utilizing the appropriate connector product.

Gateway offers three connectors aligned to Salesforce platforms:

• Nonprofit Cloud (NPC) / Agentforce for Nonprofits connector is designed for those using Salesforce’s current-generation nonprofit platform.
• Marketing Cloud connector is a fit for those using Marketing Cloud without NPSP, NPC, or Sales Cloud.
• NPSP Integration for Galaxy works for nonprofit organizations that continue to use Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). While the product remains fully supported and actively developed by Gateway, Salesforce is no longer actively developing NPSP itself.

Customers use only one connector, based on their core Salesforce platform. The connectors are not intended to stack.

The Missing Piece

The integration provides near real-time synchronization without manual exports or analyst intervention. Guest and contact demographics can sync in both directions, while transactions, memberships, renewals, fundraising data, and usage information generally flow from Galaxy to Salesforce. Anonymous transactions are excluded from all integrations. Salesforce workflows can then support communications as well as pre-visit and post-visit experiences, although those workflows are not part of the base connector.

The connector’s value is that it combines ticketing, membership, and giving data into a single guest record, enabling operations, membership, marketing, and development teams to act on the same information. It can help eliminate manual data pulls, support timely membership renewals and upgrades, enable targeted outreach, and give development teams greater visibility into guest engagement and giving.

What the Connector Covers and What It Doesn’t

There are important scope limitations. The connector does not perform Salesforce contact deduplication, write orders back to Galaxy, update certain next visit or expiration fields, manage web store marketing opt-ins, provide enhanced waitlists or a pre-built dashboard, or anonymize Galaxy data based on Salesforce actions. GDPR/CCPA-related anonymization must take place in Galaxy.

Building on the unified data enabled by the connector, BlueGator, a Gateway consulting partner and Salesforce specialist in the arts & cultural sector, offers a separate service which organizes this valuable information into Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) scoring. This allows for segmented guest groups; however, RFM is not inherent Gateway connector functionality.

Getting Started

Implementation is a guided professional-services engagement process rather than a self-service installation. It involves Salesforce configuration and an on-premises integration environment. Customers need a supported Galaxy version and test environment, Salesforce Sandbox and Production environments, a compatible Windows Server environment, Galaxy SQL and Salesforce connectivity, and an email service. Additional Salesforce storage fees may apply if allotted storage is exceeded.

Beyond the Sale Overall, the connectors address a fundamental gap. Galaxy records what happened, while Salesforce helps attractions and institutions understand and act on who the guest is. The integration extends Galaxy data beyond operations to support development, membership, marketing, and revenue initiatives. Attractions and institutions not only can grow their sales, but they also can build lasting guest relationships on solid, meaningful data.

Watch the webinar replay: From Ticket Sales to Lifelong Guests: Automating Visitor Journeys with Gateway Ticketing Systems, Inc. & Salesforce