FULL HOUSES: Turning Data into Audiences

Patron Edge leap frogs forward

22 February, 2007 at 2:28 pm fullhouses Leave a comment

The suppliers spend their lives playing catch-up, matching what the others offer, trying to leap-frog forward whenever they can. Comparing systems can be a close run thing at the top of the tree, and among the often hundreds of developments and innovations released periodically, only a few may apply in each segment of the market for systems. Patron Edge has stolen a march though, by basing their leap frog forward in version 3.22 on a quality of design and execution, while offering key developments of value to quite a few sectors.Arts centres, multiplex venues, museums and galleries will see new functionality which will make a considerable difference, including ‘timed entry’ and a much sharper front-end for general admission ticketing. There is more support too for memberships and customer relationship management to join-up the thinking, especially online, and extra tools to help the back end.

Given the interest in websites and Internet ticketing, the standard Patron Edge Internet ticketing engine, now version 3.25, offers an elegant clean interface and all the key functionality, to deliver an optimised ticket purchase experience.
Best example is their latest, the English National Opera at the Coliseum in London. Intriguingly this doubled online ticket sales on go-live, achieving over 38 per cent by volume and over 50 per cent by value. The variety of user-friendly approaches to What’s On and the ‘select a seat’ and ‘view from area’ functionality helps this by closing sales.

Patron Edge became known from a very early stage as a system which would prevent ‘orphaned’ single seats being left online, while still allowing the customer to choose seats themselves, though this could sometimes be problematic as an auditorium started to reach full capacity. Now, as well as manually disabling the block on single seats, users can set pre-defined rules for when this will occur. These can be either as a fixed time before the performance or, more significantly, once the auditorium reaches a certain percentage of its overall capacity. Automating such rules makes the management of online sales very much easier – it is already possible, for instance, to automatically withdraw certain price types and discounts either on a timed basis or when a pre-set number of tickets have been sold at a particular discount. These tools become very important at high proportions of online sales.

With web activity and online sales now critical for most venues, Patron Edge Online now makes it possible to report, at an individual visitor level, on web entry and exit points, pages viewed, time on each page, and bookings made.

Delivered by Blackbaud, there is an assumption that the system will simply link to The Raiser’s Edge for fundraising and development, so Blackbaud might not like me saying that The Patron Edge seems a match inside the system for other ticketing systems in the functionality for handling memberships, donations, fundraising and other development campaigns without any interface to another product. It has the customer relationship management tools to provide the one-stop view of transactions to operators, and the fields to manage and track the campaigns.

In terms of expediting use of the system across an organisation Patron Edge now offers a Tasks and Actions option, which enables a specific task to be associated with an individual user. That task is displayed as soon as the user logs on. Useful as a simple management tool to coordinate the work within a department, it also helps marketing and development by prompting actions to a specific contact or group of contacts. Each task can be given a deadline and can be marked as ‘complete’ when relevant, in much the same way as tasks and follow ups are managed within Outlook.

Significant enhancements have been made to Memberships especially to support loyalty programmes. As well as triggering an immediate change to the standard ticket price if the customer is identified as a valid member eligible for a discount, it is now possible to control the number of discounts available to the member. Discounts can be based on overall take-up for all performances or for a specific event; a pre-determined number of discounted tickets can be made available either for an individual event or across all performances, with different levels of benefit available to different types of membership. And, if a membership is purchased within a transaction, the membership discount can automatically be applied to all tickets in the basket.

The Query Builder in the CRM module is enhanced so gift aid and donation levels can now be incorporated into extractions. Data protection status enables the easy segmentation of contacts so records can be shared with visiting companies and producers. Copying Databox, the system can now limit the resulting number of records arising from a query to a pre-set number and randomise the selection so control groups can be set up easily.

All that means The Patron Edge is a more than serious match to any of its competitors, and the team at Blackbaud are busy building on their lead by reinforcing the back office to ensure effective installation, commissioning and support. It remains true, that no matter how much users like the front end, delivering the support clinches the sale for most users. Blackbaud say they are signing up two new customers a month, with latest signings being English National Opera, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Shrewsbury Music Hall.

Take a look at the online ticketing engine: www.eno.org
For system sales enquiries contact Rachael Easton: rachael.easton@blackbaud.co.uk or phone 0207 921 9600. Blackbaud www.blackbaud.co.uk

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