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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posted by laura at 4:32 PM Permalink
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9 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.
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