For performing arts and nonprofit venues
Switching from PatronManager?
Your patrons, their giving history, your order history and the seats you have already sold come with you — and Noctern costs your venue nothing to run.
Or see the full feature list first.
Free for the venue
There are no setup fees, no monthly charges, no contracts and no hidden costs. Noctern earns a small service fee on each ticket sold — paid by the ticket buyer, not you — and takes no cut of a donation. You can stop using Noctern at any time.
How the move works
Five steps, in this order, with a read-only rehearsal before each one that writes anything.
1. You send one export
Noctern reads the standard Salesforce weekly export of your PatronManager org — the whole CSV set, straight out of the ZIP. There is nothing to re-key and no screen to scrape.
2. Everything dry-runs first
Each importer runs read-only before it runs for real and prints exactly what it would create, merge or skip, row by row. Nothing is written until someone reads that and says yes — and a re-run of the same file makes no duplicates.
3. Your season is rebuilt on your seating charts
Upcoming shows come across as draft Noctern events on your seating charts, with their dates, on-sale windows, price levels and images. They stay draft until you publish them, so nothing goes on sale behind your back.
4. Seats you already sold become real tickets
Every seat sold in PatronManager for an upcoming show is matched to the same seat on the Noctern chart and converted into a real ticket on a real order. The QR your patrons are already holding resolves to that ticket at the door, so nobody has to be re-issued anything.
5. Every show reconciles before you reopen sales
Show by show, the seat count in Noctern is checked against the manifest from the export and has to match. Sales stay closed for the final load and reopen once the counts and the seat locks read clean.
What comes across from PatronManager
Read from the Salesforce export, written into Noctern records you can search, segment and report on.
- Patrons and how to reach them
- Names, email, phone, mailing address and country, salutations and formal/informal address names, donor recognition, staff notes — and the suppression flags that matter: do-not-email, do-not-mail and deceased.
- Households
- Account-level household grouping, with the formal and informal household salutations used on letters.
- Order history
- Past ticket orders arrive as read-only history: buyer, date, status, total, and the line items with event, performance date, seat, price level and quantity. They show up on the patron record and they count in your reports, so year-over-year comparisons do not restart at zero.
- Gifts, pledges and sustainers
- Donations with their fund, close date, amount, stage, anonymity, dedications and acknowledgment state; check numbers, check dates and gateway transaction ids; recurring gifts with their schedule, amount paid and next payment date.
- Interaction history
- Logged calls, emails and tasks land on the patron as interaction history, so the context your development team built up stays with the donor.
- Event categories and discount codes
- Your event categories are mapped onto Noctern categories, and your promo codes come over as venue-wide Noctern discount codes, switched off until you review and enable each one.
- Outstanding gift certificates
- Unredeemed balances load from a list you supply, so a patron can still spend the certificate they bought before the move.
- Rebuilt rather than copied: your seating charts
- Seat maps are built in Noctern’s layout editor and then matched to your sold seats by section, row and seat label. Noctern does not try to reconstruct your chart from PatronManager’s canvas geometry — the match is on the labels your patrons and your ushers actually read.
What you get with Noctern
One platform for the seat, the door, the gift and the report that follows.
Reserved seating, built by you
A drag-and-drop layout editor for rows, tables, booths, sections and general-admission areas, with pricing tiers and buyer-selectable price categories per show. The same chart drives your public event page and your box office.
A real box office
Walk-up sales, seat holds, comps, group sales with deposits, split tender, will-call and refunds — plus a patron panel so the person on the phone is looking at the same record your development team is.
A door that keeps working when the wifi does not
Scan QR codes for check-in on any phone or tablet, take card payments at the door with Tap to Pay, print tickets and receipts, and keep selling from a downloaded manifest when the connection drops — orders and check-ins sync when it comes back.
Fundraising next to the ticket, not in another system
Take a gift at checkout or on a shareable giving page with its own QR code. Supporters pick the fund and can cover the processing fee, recurring sustainers bill themselves, and your venue keeps 100% — Noctern takes no cut of a gift.
Donor records your board can read
Every buyer and donor is a patron record with giving history, household, interactions and duplicate review. Funds and appeals with goals, a gift ledger, pledges and sustainers, an acknowledgment queue, year-end giving statements, and donor-retention and LYBUNT/SYBUNT reports.
The nonprofit paperwork, handled
Receipts go out with your legal name, EIN and deductibility statement and their own sequential receipt numbers. A 501(c)(3) venue can run tax-exempt fundraiser events at $0 tax per line, with the annual allowance counted for you.
Questions venues ask first
What does Noctern cost?
Noctern has no setup fee, no monthly fee and no contract, and venues pay nothing to use it. Ticket buyers pay a service fee at checkout, and Noctern takes no cut of a donation.
How long are ticket sales closed during the move?
About two hours, in one sitting — and that window is the only time ticket sales are unavailable. Sales are paused for the final load, the export is taken as close to that moment as possible, and sales reopen as soon as every show has reconciled seat for seat. Everything before that — patrons, giving history, order history, building the season — is rehearsed on a copy first, while you keep selling.
Do our patrons have to do anything?
No. The ticket a patron is already holding keeps working: the QR printed by PatronManager resolves to the Noctern ticket for that seat, on the web scanner and at the door. Re-issuing Noctern tickets is an option, not a requirement.
Is our giving and ticket history still usable afterwards?
Yes. Imported orders and gifts sit on the patron record and count in reports: imported orders show up in attendance and year-over-year reporting, and imported gifts in donor-retention and lapsed-donor lists. Your numbers do not restart at the cutover.
Who does the work?
Noctern runs the import and the reconciliation. Your side is the export from PatronManager, a look at the column mapping, the list of which events are real shows, and the show-by-show review before sales reopen. Venue staff can also import a contacts file themselves from the admin.
How do we train the team?
Noctern has a Help Center with role-based guides and short Learn tracks for box office, development and venue admin staff, and a trainer view that shows who has finished what.
How do we start?
Email [email protected] and we will look at your export and plan the move.
More in the general FAQ and the Help Center.
Send us your export and we will show you the plan
We will read it, tell you what comes across, what has to be rebuilt, and what the cutover looks like for your season — before you commit to anything.
By signing up, you agree to the Organizer Agreement and Organizer Guidelines.
Noctern is not affiliated with PatronManager or Salesforce.