Portals

Expert

Exhibitors at your fair, a gallery co-hosting a private view, sponsors with collectors of their own — partners often need to invite guests to your event, and a portal gives each one their own workspace for exactly that, within an allocation you control. Partners invite under their own name, and every response lands on your guest list, labelled with who invited them. You hand out invitation capacity without handing over your admin.

Admins and event managers can create and manage portals. Activating one costs 150 credits, charged once when the partner claims it, and not refunded if you later archive the portal.

Portals in the sidebar opens two pages. Managed Portals is this guide: portal groups and allocations you create for your partners. Connected Portals All plans lists portals another organisation has shared with you. See Using Your Portal.

The pieces

Setting up

1. Open Portals → Managed Portals and create a portal group: name it, write the welcome message partners see, and add a banner.
2. Add a portal for each partner, then grant allocations: which events or collections they may invite to, and how many guest places on each.
3. Share each portal’s link with its partner.

How a partner claims their portal

The partner opens their portal link, signs in or creates a free ARTSVP account, and connects it to their own organisation. From then on the portal is theirs alone — one portal belongs to one partner organisation, so a partner working two fairs with you claims a portal in each group. Your team keeps oversight from the portal group page, which shows each portal’s status and usage, and the group’s welcome message arrives as the partner’s first inbox message.

What partners can do

Inside their portal, a partner can:

• see their allocations and how many places remain;
• invite guests personally, using the same invitation flow your team uses;
• copy an allocation-capped booking link to share more widely;
• watch their own guest list of responses as they arrive;
• ask you for more places, and message you in the shared inbox.

They cannot see your other guests, your events’ settings, or anything beyond what you allocated.

How allocations are counted

• The unit is guests, not invitations. A booking for four people uses four places, whether it came from one invitation or a booking link.
• Places are held as soon as a booking starts. A booking still in progress counts against the allocation; if it is cancelled, rejected, or times out, the places return. The “remaining” figure a partner sees counts confirmed guests only, so a few more places may be spoken for than it suggests.
• The cap is enforced when a guest books, not when an invitation goes out. Once an allocation is full, the partner’s booking link stops accepting guests and their outstanding invitations can no longer be redeemed. A partner can still create and send invitations against a full allocation, so raise it before they send if you want those places honoured.
• One allocation per portal per event. Grant a partner more places by raising the existing allocation, not by adding a second one.
• Unlimited is a valid setting. Leave the limit empty when a partner should not be capped.

Managing allocations

Raise an allocation at any time from the portal group page; lowering it below what is already used does not cancel bookings that exist. Partners can request more places themselves — up to 50 at a time, with an optional note — and the request opens a thread in your shared inbox, where you accept it by raising the allocation.

Once an event has ended it drops out of a partner’s actionable list, though their guest data stays visible. When a portal has served its purpose, archive it to switch it off.

The shared inbox

Every portal has a message thread between your team and the partner. Use it for briefings, allocation requests, and door instructions, so the conversation stays attached to the portal rather than scattered across email.

Turn on Allow allocation increase requests in the portal group settings when you want partners to use Increase allocation. Their requests open a thread in the portal inbox for your team to review.

Partners also get notified as their guests respond. Each portal can receive email and WhatsApp alerts for new bookings and for check-ins; all four are on by default, and the partner controls them — along with the notification email address and phone number — from their portal settings.

Duplicate portal, from a portal’s row menu, copies its allocations and booking links into the same group. The copy is Inactive until your partner connects it, and the 150-credit activation applies when they do. Notification email, phone number, and notification preferences are not copied.

The read-only deadline

A portal becomes read-only four months after it is activated. Its settings lock, it can no longer issue booking links, and its existing links are shown as disabled inside the portal; guest data stays readable, and portal group pages show a Read-only badge and let you filter by it. Links the partner already shared keep working until their allocation runs out, so lower the allocation if you need to close a season off completely — and create a new portal for the next season rather than reusing an old one.

Tip: Set allocations slightly below your real ceiling. Raising one takes a moment, but places already promised are hard to take back.

Keep reading: Using Your Portal · Exhibitors and allocations · Invitations · Billing and credits