Ask Idealware: Integrated Tool that Includes Ticketing?
Chuck asks: I am opening a new small cultural arts center and want to use online software for donors, web management, e-mail, etc. Your article was very helpful on all this, but as I also need to sell tickets for assigned seats, I wondered if there was online software that would do all these things.Eric Leland at Leland Design says:
I'm not aware of a system that integrates donor, contact, e-marketing and event/ticketing in one, but it's possible that one exists. Alternatively, depending on your integration needs, separate ticketing solutions may suffice. For example, services such as Brown Paper Tickets and Acteva are very affordable, offering services that do not require monthly fees and can be linked to your existing website.
These services earn money based on your ticket transactions, charging a fixed fee plus a percentage of the ticket amount for each transaction. In the case of Acteva, there are some additional features customers can use to customize the look and feel of the ticketing system to look more like your existing website. If tracking ticket purchases is critical to integrate with your other information about people, try talking to these vendors to find out what integration features they offer, as the trend more and more is for vendors to open up their services for clients seeking to integrate with their other systems.
A very smart colleague of mine, Greg Beuthin, spend time a few years back looking into lower cost ticketing systems for nonprofits. Although the information is old, much of it is still useful and I would highly recommend checking out Greg's blog post about ticketing.
Laura adds:
I'm also not aware of any integrated system that allows for ticketing of assigned seats as well as things like online donations and email blasting, and I'd be pretty surprised if something nonprofit-specific like this existed that neither Eric or I were aware of. But of course, I've been wrong before! Anyone out there know of such a system?
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13 Comments:
It would be worth poking around salesforce to see if someone has written a plugin for thiese features.
iModules Software has some of these capabilities built in -- member DB, email marketing, online commerce, custom form creation, event management -- but not a specific "ticket manager" application. You can create "commerce items" with purchase limits (e.g. 250 tickets, 100 seats, etc.) that might suffice. Customizable confirmation emails could include an auto-incremented "ticket number" that could tie back to an in-house reporting/ticket system. Again, it's not out-of-the-box, but it might work.
iModules doesn't portion out their software -- it is all or nothing -- but it's a pretty decent package. There is a bit of a learning curve thanks to the level of complexity baked into their Forms system (which lies beneath underneath the Events and Donation systems), but the wizards for setting up Events are pretty decent.
There is s/w that does this, but it is very, very expensive, and almost certainly not appropriate for the questioner. Tessitura is a high-end integrated package, and Blackbaud sells the Patron Edge which integrates into their other products. A little googling turns up Galathea STS's ENTA and Tickets.com's ProVenue. And in re-reading the question, I see that the query asks for SaaS solutions, which I don't believe Tessitura or Patron Edge are; I don't know about the other two.
But again, I doubt that any of these are a good match for the questioner.
As Eric suggests, Brown Paper Tickets is well regarded, and we at the Cultural Alliance have liked Tix.com for our half-price ticketing program. I think the questioner will be well served by finding a strong ticketing solution that can compete with things like venue seat maps and seat selection and finding ways to move data back and forth, perhaps through APIs, rather than seeking out an all-in-one solution.
Terrific, guys - thanks! Yes, as Thomas suggests, arts ticketing is an area in which I worry about (at least less expensive) jack-of-all-trades software or trying to build or hack my own. Ticketing is more than just another kind of online payment... You often need to worry about giving folks the ability to see and select their seats, and then get them a paper ticket.
If you imagine buying theater tickets, if the system said "Thanks for your purchase - you've been assigned seats B12 and B13. Print out this page and show it to the usher"... likely that would be disconcerting to you. People have expectations as to how ticketing will work, and those expectations aren't trivial to fulfill.
So folks like Brown Paper Tickets or Tix.com (or certainly, Tessatura) provide online seat selection functionality and fulfillment of paper tickets that you can't reasonably put together yourself...
Like others, I am not aware of an all-in-one SaaS package for all the functions mentioned by Chuck. I think there is a reason for this. It would be very hard to develop and support an all-in-one solution which was excellent (or even adequate) on all fronts. That may be why things are going the way Thomas Taylor mentioned, with SaaS ticketing packages available for selling to the public, and which speak to software applications that are accessible to staff and that cover the other needs. When you shop for your applications, SaaS or other, look into their integration features. A few integrated ticketing/donations packages are mentioned in this article by Fundraising’s Best Side Kick? Your Box Office.
I vote Brown Paper Tickets.
Most ticketing software is pretty pricey, certainly out of the budget range of small arts companies. I poked around on both brownpapertickets.com and tix.com, which offer the same thing, ultimately - event ticketing, at no charge to the event producer. The biggest differences between the two companies are that Brown Paper Tickets' service charge is lower, AND they donate part of their profits to charity. Who can beat that?
Wouldn't CiviEvent fit the bill at least partially?
In fact, the full suite of CiviCRM applications can pretty much handle everything the OP wants.
Worth taking a look, in my opinion.
Venkat
Smart or dumb? Use Excel and/or Access (Or the OpenOffice equivalents) to generate a list of seat numbers, perhaps by section, and the price, and import them into any web shopping cart.
The emailed receipt would serve as a "Ticket"...
maybe?
Theatre Manager developed and sold by Arts Management Systems in Calgary is a completely integrated patron, donor, marketing and ticketing software that includes online capabilities. I'm the box office manager for the Memphis Symphony, and we use Theatre Manager with GREAT success. It's inexpensive, has a great support team, and does everything a nonprofit needs.
Acteva is all-in-one... it enables people to accept donations, membership dues, and/or event registrations and REAL ticketing (real tickets delivered to the buyer plus they are bar-coded). Acteva also provides e-mail marketing tools and publishes events to external sites. Acteva is purely pay-as-you-go with no contracts locking you in. Check it out. It doesn't cost a thing to set up an account.
I have to disagree about Acteva. Knowledge As Power is currently using it after getting a discounted package for them from Tech Soup. Even with the $300 credit and $35 startup fee, Acteva has proved to be a BIG waste of money and way more trouble than it's worth.
Here's my big gripes with them:
-Their user interface isn't intuitive at all; your ratio of poking around to doing real work will be 3 to 1.
-They only cut checks! And only twice a month! NO direct deposit. Where does Acteva live? 1994?
-Their customer service is shoddy. When you bring up a problem with them, their standard refrain is, "Well, we *do* have 10,000 clients and they seem happy..." Really? Because you just lost one who could've brought you in 20 more clients.
-The percentage they take from their processing is ridiculously high. Like, smoking crack kind of high.
-Getting a call back from Acteva takes days and days. After having a billing problem "fast tracked" I got a call back 3 days later, to find that the guy would need another 4 days to get me any result.
I'm sure there's more I'll find lacking in their services before my event is over tonight. Stay tuned for updates.
For future events, I'm going back to Event Brite, which I'm shocked wasn't listed on this post. EB has treated me right, run my lists, direct-deposited, and eased my events before, I can't believe I "cheated" on them with a system I thought would be more robust.
Thanks for your comments, Sarah - very helpful! Just a few comments to your comments...
The pricing schemes used by these event reg tools make them vary substantially in attractiveness depending on the cost of your event. Aectiva isn't the cheapest (EventBrite is certainly cheaper) but I wouldn't call them "smoking crack high." Maybe their pricing model is particularly unfortunately for your ticket prices?
And checks rather than direct deposit isn't unusual in this class of tool. In fact, two checks rather than one a month is nice - just one check a month isn't unusual.
As far as I know, EventBrite doesn't ticket for assigned seats, like for a theater performance - does it? That's the topic of this post.
Hi Laura,
Actually, Acteva's customization for specific tickets, while it does include specific seats, provides less customization than Eventbrite.
For instance, if you wanted to offer a pair of tickets at a discount, Acteva has no built-in way for you to notate that this sale equals two tickets. If you want to sell items for this event with tickets (like a t-shirt), Acteva counts these items as a ticket going towards your total number of tickets available---not as a thing you're selling. Finally, if you do want such features, you have to pay Acteva for custom event support--for features that are standard on Eventbrite. Because of Acteva's system, I was left re-calibrating our available ticket number throughout the day of the event.
Though check payment may be standard for older, existing ticketing systems, I wonder why nonprofits put up with this. Simply the pace of life today has more of our supporters registering later than ever to events, providing organizers little leeway to take ticket sales and apply them to costs before the event. Yes, large nonprofits could probably absorb this early cost, but I don't think that sort of impact is necessary any more. From my talks with Acteva, this practice seemed to slow their work through a detailed system of check-mailing. What is preventing companies like Acteva from going to direct deposit?
I think, too often, because nonprofits function with a scarcity of resources, they tolerate inefficient, poorly designed, and recently antiquated technology, just because it does one or two mission-critical features. I recognize that these inefficiencies cause my nonprofit to loose time, funding, and volunteers---and just won't tolerate it. Especially on an event day.
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