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A note from Katie on the December Release Listen to a recap from Katie Campbell, Sr. Director of Product, as she details the focus of this release and provides an update about upcoming new features.…

A note from Katie on the November Release Listen to a recap from Katie Campbell, Sr. Director of Product, as she details the focus of this release and provides an update about upcoming new features.…

A note from Katie on the October Release Listen to a recap from Katie Campbell, Sr. Director of Product, as she details the focus of this release and provides an update about upcoming new features.…

A Note from Katie on the September Release Listen to a recap from Katie Campbell, Sr. Director of Product, as she details the focus of this release and provides an update about upcoming new features.…

A Note from Chris on the August Release Watch Chris Federspiel, CEO & Co-Founder, in a brief video recap as he details notable enhancements and fixes made to several Blackthorn applications.…

A Note from Katie on the July Release Listen to a recap from Katie Campbell, Sr. Director of Product, as she details the focus of this release and provides an update about upcoming new features.…

Highlights We are looking for more participants in our Caching early access group. This enhancement provides faster updates to the Events webapp, more reliable syncing of event groups, and decreased page load time. Open…

Highlights Experience the power of our new caching 2.0 architecture! You can expect faster, more accurate syncing between Salesforce and your event webpages. Join our early access group now. New capacity checkpoints have been…

Key Notes This is a 2-part release. Only install part 1 if you’re having a bug with optional processing fees OR if you want to use our Smart Scheduler in Experience Cloud. Part 2,…

Key Notes Learn how to benefit from Blackthorn Office Hours (video). Blackthorn Payments now supports high volume batch processing up to 75. Twelve updates have been added to the Storefront Webapp inventory management making…

Key Notes Blackthorn Storefront is now available with Experience Cloud and our new Lightning Web Component (LWC) release! Layout updates are required for Events with the release of the new Alternative Text for Visual…

A Note from Chris on the December Major Release Listen to a recap from our CEO as he details the focus of this release and provides an update on new features to look out for.…

A Note from Chris on the November Release Listen to a recap from our CEO as he details the focus of this release and provides an update on new features to look out for. Release…

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A Note from Chris on the September Release Listen to a recap from our CEO as he details the focus of this release and provides an update on new features to look out for.…

Waitlisting is a great way to collect information from every interested visitor – even those who were unable to sign up. And if you’re using Salesforce to manage your prospects and customers, there are huge…

Stripe Checkout Expand your Global Reach Introducing Stripe Checkout for PayLink. Offer customers a quick, seamless checkout experience optimized for their device and location. Support More Currencies & Languages 25+ languages and 135+ currencies…

It’s safe to say that everyone is making changes due to the recent social distancing requests to help fight the spread of the Coronavirus. But we’re all in this together, and we are all…

With Blackthorn Payments, you can make taking payments from your customers both simple and secure. See the winning Salesforce Demo Jam featuring Blackthorn.io’s Matt Frank and Sue Mang and learn how…

Mobile Payments App Use Blackthorn’s Mobile Payments App in Salesforce’s Field Service Lightning Mobile, Salesforce Mobile, and more. Find it on the AppExchange Streamlined Process Start from Salesforce Mobile or Field Service Mobile. One…

Blackthorn.io continues to focus on our evergreen stability initiatives to provide the best, most reliable events and payments experience on Salesforce. Salesforce users worldwide, from nonprofit organizations to higher education institutions, have implemented Salesforce technology…

  This event management tip focuses on the importance of the attendee experience. An event attendee experience is the sum of all direct and indirect experiences at an event. People may forget facts but the…

How do you measure event success? Well, attendee feedback is the best way to gauge what went right and wrong during an event. Getting feedback from attendees allows adjustments to be made for future events…

Event tracking can most easily be done with Google Analytics tools that are free – or paid. Obviously, the paid tool is going to give you more information you need to get the best implementation…

The Benefit of Alumni Connectivity Alumni connections can be the backbone of your university. Who better to promote the success of your current students than students who have previously attended and graduated successfully? After entering…

When it comes to fundraising events or events for organizations of any kind, there’s a lot of information out there. But one of the most important tips that most people do not learn is that…

When you plan an event, it’s not enough just to plan the event itself such as the type of event, the type and location of the venue, the speakers, entertainment, refreshments, and other details. It…

QR codes are quickly becoming a popular way for people to check in to events. By scanning a QR code with their smartphone, attendees can quickly and easily check in to an event. This can…

Event planners say that in the mind of the guests at your event, it’s the check-in that is the first step of the event. It offers guests a first impression of your event, and sets…

Organizing an event can be a lot of work. One of the most important steps is setting up registration and ticketing so that people can sign up and purchase tickets. There are a few different…

As an organizer, you may be confronted with a whole series of new challenges in the “new normal”, ranging from complying with Covid-19 safety and social distancing regulations to marketing your event in a much…

According to a recent HubSpot and Eventbrite survey of event organizers and attendees, 84% of respondents feel that attending events is an important part of their job, with 79% going to events specifically to learn…

Deciding on the type of event you will have is just the first step in the long business process for creating and planning an event that is successful. Luckily with information technology and content management…

Anyone planning an event knows that registration is a key part of the process. But what questions should you ask potential attendees when they sign up? In this blog post, we’ll provide a list of…

In order to have successful events or conferences, some form of registration is needed for various reasons. It is essential to a business or organization to know who is coming to their event. Knowing how…

Event managers often make several common mistakes when designing and implementing an event registration process, which is done through careful research of trends and challenges in event management. Event planning is a complex project with…

Event registration is a vital process for successful event planning. It only takes a few off-putting experiences to forego attending at the beginning of an event entirely. Due to this, it’s recommended that a business…

Conferences and events measure their success with three things: participant satisfaction, the actual production, and the ability for customers to make business contacts during these events. There is a lot of planning involved in events…

Planning professional events is difficult enough when it comes to a workplace or conferences, but for higher education, it can prove even more intense. Higher education and learning services are essential to finding a career,…

Time and donor money goes into every event, but what goes on behind the scenes is more impressive. If you want to learn how to generate engagement, and to promote high event registration, you must…

If you are running a volunteer program for your nonprofit organization, you will find the best volunteer management software indispensable. These are programs designed to help organizations efficiently keep track of their volunteers while providing…

Isn’t it interesting that a decade ago very few nonprofit organizations used nonprofit webinar software but now none of them can do without it? Face-to-face peer-to-peer meetings don’t happen as much as they used to…

Non-profit organizations can benefit from the best nonprofit accounting software for their accounting needs because it saves time and resources. A non-profit organization should have reliable software that will track all accounting in an easy-to-understand…

Salesforce is a cloud-based platform that facilitates the seamless management of volunteers, donations, and associated tasks. As Salesforce continues to grow in popularity amongst nonprofits, it can be helpful to have a sound understanding of…

Nonprofit organizations are establishments that are operated with the sole aim of meeting public or social needs with no intention of making a profit. Nonprofits are accountable to donors, volunteers, founders, recipients of the program,…

When it comes to choosing interactive management solutions for a nonprofit organization, it can be tricky. Looking through FAQs, pricing, needs, and features, it can get complicated. You may not even be sure what your…

When it comes to online fundraising for nonprofit organizations, administrative and marketing staff may have no idea where to begin. Whether your nonprofit works in schools, in one country or two, whether it has employees…

Once your nonprofit organization has created an online community and a product (business), start thinking about accepting payment online. The modern day cash register is a payment software that is able to accomplish a lot…

Student recruitment events such as job and career fairs can be a great way of recruiting students for a particular college and/or introducing them into the workforce. As a high school student, they need direction…

The alumni community of an institution is a large network of professionals in several fields of study. The advantage here is that all of them already share the same background. If they seek employment opportunities,…

For higher education professionals, it is important to host student engagement events to help students stay motivated in their university work and engaged with their fellow classmates. Moreover, these events also help students discover extracurricular…

Teams using Salesforce Communities to interact with existing members of their campus communities can easily create in-person and virtual events using Blackthorn Events native Salesforce application. These branded event registration pages can be used…

What kind of life do you offer the students on your campus? What does their student life include? What is campus life like to new students? How can students enjoy life more at your school?…

Our Mobile Check Capture feature is in Beta. Be one of the first and few to try it out and give functionality feedback before it goes live! Contact support today to get more information.  It’s…

Ensure Salesforce PCI Compliance and Data Privacy with Blackthorn Compliance Do you need to ensure Salesforce PCI compliance and data privacy within your organization? Look no further than Blackthorn Compliance, the ultimate solution built…

In case you missed it, check out our October 2021 Events Release Webinar featuring Matt Frank, Director of Tech Evangelism, Chris Federspiel, Founder and CEO, and Daniel Sanchez, VP of Engineering. Our team does a wonderful…

Chris is the head of Product and CEO/cofounder at Blackthorn.io, where they created multiple apps for the Salesforce.com platform. He develops high-level UX and technical approaches with their Product and Engineering teams. Cofounding the…

In this quick video, you’ll learn how much easier it is to run your virtual events by starting them directly in Salesforce. Our Director of Tech Evangelism, Matt Frank, gives you the tips and tricks…

Hear from our Founder and CEO Chris Federspiel on the origin of Blackthorn.io and how we grew 100% year over year, expanded our team, and made the highest-rated events platform on the Salesforce AppExchange!

Retail e-commerce sales are projected to make up almost 14% of total retail sales by 2021, more than doubling its contribution since 2012 (6%). But what you might find surprising is that most customers are dissatisfied…

Patients and community members today expect a personalized experience at every step of their health journey. Initial interactions with receptionists or contacts over the phone or online are critical to engaging patients and driving loyalty.…

Modernize Recruitment with a Salesforce Events App: USC Marshall’s Quest for Efficiency Using a third-party event solution outside of Salesforce to plan and run events, USC Marshall staff members found little to like in using…

Hear Chris Federspiel and Kristen Hicks discuss how admissions teams can respond to a constantly evolving recruiting world and meet their prospects where they are; online!  

Increased Attendance. With Blackthorn Events, PMD Alliance was able to accelerate the number of virtual donor events they held, allowing them to increase their overall attendance and remain on target for their $50,000 October fundraising…

If you’re hosting events across the globe with individuals of different nationalities and languages, multi-language support is a must. Help your event attendees avoid confusion and frustration by offering event landing pages and online registration…

Wow! Over the last 18 months we’ve received amazing feedback from you, our customers and partners, about and how our apps are making payment processing and event management easier. Your success is what drives…

Every institution is unique, but there are some things many have in common. One of those common problems is getting more prospects and students to your admissions and important campus events. Washington University at St.…

IVL With the transition to virtual events due to COVID-19, IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute was able to increase attendance and engagement by targeting the right individuals with the right events. Not only did this…

If you use Salesforce to send emails, you know how challenging it can be to create engaging emails using only standard Salesforce email templates. Well, gone are the days of being limited to plain text…

Toronto Metropolitan University When the shift to virtual events occurred in early 2020, the Ted Rogers School of Management quickly realized they needed to standardize their event management systems onto a single platform. As the…

Here at Blackthorn, we’re constantly innovating to develop better products based on customer feedback and the needs of the industries we serve. Our customers often send invoices to their clients for payment over the…

Campuses around the globe have canceled their visit days, tours, and other admissions events, which are often the foundation of a recruitment strategy. The good news is, there are still ways to engage with interested…

We’re obsessed with making accepting and processing payments in Salesforce fun and easy. A big part of fine-tuning and expanding our payment offerings has been helping customers increase their checkout conversions and enhance their buyer…

In my previous post I investigated the basic structure of Lightning Web Components. Now I’m going to dig deeper into one of the very crucial aspects of the framework: how you communicate with the…

March was a monumental month for Blackthorn. After months of development and countless iterations, we released the Event Wizard for Blackthorn Events. Meet the Event Wizard Inspired by our customers’ feedback,…

Event planning organizations are a phenomenal resource for education, networking, certifications…the works. Like our events app Blackthorn Events we’re all about saving you time. Don’t know which one is for you? Here’s…

Making a payment is a crucial touchpoint in any customer journey. While payments may seem simple from the outside, several complex components work behind the scenes to complete a transaction. If you are unfamiliar with…

Give your customers the flexibility to make payments with both credit cards and ACH while taking PCI-compliant payments directly from your Salesforce application using Blackthorn Payment’s updated Virtual Terminal. The addition of ACH to…

Need to send Level 3 card data? Blackthorn Payments supports “level 3 processing” via Stripe In short, level 3 gets you the best processing rate available by providing the gateway and processor full transaction…

“There’s no prize for the richest person in the graveyard” is one of my favorite expressions. I believe an allocation of funds should go to helping others and our planet. As such, Blackthorn is…

Blackthorn Events recently participated in Salesforce Demo Jam as a part of the Salesforce Ed Summit 2021. See the winning presentation and learn more about the number one events platform on the Salesforce AppExchange!…

Event planners and tech-savvy marketers rejoice! The light at the end of the virtual-only-events tunnel is here. A lot of organizations are combining virtual and in-person formats to maximize results. If you haven’t already,…

Virtual events are here to stay. We’ve helped institutions like The HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, and non-profits like IVL create virtual events at scale and with impressive success. The HU saw over…

Being part of a team that’s always been 100% remote, I cherish the times we get to connect virtually. Our team gets together via Zoom every Friday afternoon for a Happy Hour game. Last…

Wow. It was awesome. 16 people flew from 9 US states plus India, China, and Spain to meet in Orlando for 8 days. We’ve been in business for four years. To date, we’ve never…

In December 2018, Salesforce announced a new frontend developer paradigm: Lightning Web Components. But¦wait a minute! Didn’t they announce Lightning Components in 2016, the new frontend framework, and VisualForce finally retired? Haha, sure, but…

Written By Kristen Hicks, tips curated by the Blackthorn team. I worked in a traditional office setting for over ten years before becoming a remote coworker. If there’s one thing I’m grateful for right…

How Can Businesses Stand Out and Inspire Customer Loyalty? In January 2020, when news of a novel coronavirus started to break, it was impossible to fathom the magnitude of impact it would have on…

Blackthorn Payments provides the deepest Salesforce and Stripe integration available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Because we’re a trusted, official partner to both Salesforce and Stripe, teams can feel safe knowing they’re using a solution that’s on…

Basic and Complex Subscription Billing Let’s face it; subscription models are often complex. Say you have 50 customers on subscription plan A, 75 on plan B, and 100 on plan C. How do you…

What is QA? Quality assurance (QA) is a way of reducing bugs in products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services to customers. With frequent updates comes frequent testing, and we’re no stranger…

I was recently on a call with the founder of a Salesforce Implementation company new to Blackthorn, explaining how our customers and our own company use our Payments app to automate our subscription billing…

Businesses and organizations are looking at utilizing online events for the foreseeable future after canceling in-person events to combat the spread of COVID-19. While we know folks are dealing with more than just events…

Retail e-commerce sales are projected to make up almost 14% of total retail sales by 2021, more than doubling its contribution since 2012 (6%). But what you might find surprising is that most customers…

A major goal of any field service business is to scale as quickly as possible. But as your organization grows, you may struggle to keep up. Processes get more complicated and arduous, stifling your…

Plaid Integration: Let customers connect their bank accounts faster so you can get paid faster. Plaid makes it much easier to pay by simply and safely connecting bank account information, decreasing the need for…

What do all of the compliance acronyms mean? Millions of websites today still fall out of ADA, WCAG 2.1 & Section 508 Compliance. Wait what do all of those acronyms mean? In a nutshell,…

Brief Overview of SCA SCA or Strong Customer Authentication, is a requirement of Europe’s revised Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) mandate to increase security and minimize fraud risk around electronic payments. PSD2 aims to…

Written by: Kristen Hicks, VP of Revenue Operations at Blackthorn.io, and former Midwest College Director of Marketing and Communications. If you’re in higher ed marketing, you’ve probably seen a flurry of emails and LinkedIn…

We™re getting a lot of inquiries to have a ˜Billing Portal™ run out of Salesforce Communities. There are a number of approaches to achieving this. Many can be done with our app, Blackthorn…

Blackthorn.io Earns 2021 Great Place to Work Certification New York, NY Blackthorn.io is proud to now be Certified as a Great Place to Work! The prestigious award is based entirely on what current…

Hear from Diane Biesecker, Director of I.T. at University of Virginia Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy on how they use Blackthorn Events to streamline all of their in-person, virtual,…

The rapid rise of digital banking across the global economy has made securing transactions and protecting consumers a growing priority. As payment fraud increases, with global losses projected to reach a staggering…

CDL Legal Before Blackthorn Taking payments from drivers for services was clunky. It was mostly a manual system that could not be automated. Customer service from their previous vendor was poor – the answer to…

Hear our Founder and CEO, Chris Federspiel, on the Work: Unfiltered podcast!

Salesforce payment processing with PayLink offers a seamless, mobile-responsive payment request feature that simplifies the transaction process, ensuring ease-of-use for your customers. Built natively in Salesforce with Stripe Checkout, PayLink offers secure exchange to the…

How does Fringe Work? Employers award their employees points. Those points can then be spent on the Fringe platform, which features over 300 vendors. Along with giving monthly benefits and rewards for a job well…

The Problem When AdventHealth needed an event management and registration app to organize community events across their organization, it was simply easier to adopt what one of their hospitals was already using. But the app’s…

Salesforce permissions can get very complicated, very quickly. Diagnosing user, object, and page permissions can be frustrating, so in our August Events Release, we created a simple Health Check Page to make troubleshooting an absolute…



IAB Before Blackthorn When IAB first discovered Blackthorn, they were using four separate apps some native to Salesforce, others not to manage all aspects of ALM. Attendee and conference information was scattered across those platforms,…

Your brand is the story that connects people to your products and services. And individuals looking at your website and event information pages need to understand that story. That’s why we created an easy way…

Dear Blackthorn customers and partners, We are now in our sixth year, we have 500+ customers, two core products, a stack of customer use cases, very high spikes of transaction rates (API calls), and more…

In this quick video, you’ll learn how to find your “Return on Events” mindset, focusing on how virtual events can be a powerful tool in your business arsenal. Our Director of Tech Evangelism, Matt Frank,…

Chris Federspiel is the CEO and Co-Founder of Blackthorn. Everyday we all use apps and we never think about the work that goes into making sure the apps are easy enough to understand and use.…

A recurring theme that we’ve heard this year is individuals and organizations looking for an events solution to help manage event details as well as automated communication. A number of people have expressed gaps with…

In August 2020, global events company, Identity Group, released a study. They wanted to know what event type works in a post-pandemic world and who would attend them. As you’ll guess, this research made headlines,…

Discover the power of Blackthorn Events, the Salesforce event management app for recruiting and admissions, alumni relations, and student engagement. Maximize your potential by utilizing events to connect with past, present, and future students.…

Data Breaches and Settlements Cost Companies More Than $1.5 Billion. Blackthorn.io Acquires Compliance So Customers Can Master the Art of PII Whac-A-Mole on Salesforce Updated on October 22, 2021 It’s official: We’re changing our name.…

Blackthorn.io, the leader in apps for events, payments, and engagement on Salesforce, is excited to announce our inclusion in the Latka500 Fastest Growing SaaS Companies for 2021! This list is full of innovative SaaS organizations that…