Posts filed under ‘Bulletin’
That’s the Ticket.com!
Rare Domain Name Available Until Tuesday
Excuse me while I catch my breath …
“For travel, sports, music ticketing services — there is no better address,” says www.domainconsultant.com analyst Mike Fiol. “It means instant market share into the massive ticket industry. What is that worth?“
Yes ‘instant market share’ …
A couple of things spring to mind, ticket.com ain’t as exciting as tickets.com, afterall who wants to go anywhere on their own 
But the main issue is that a ticket is purely a means to an end, i.e. it is secondary to the primary purpose of the purchase. There is no demand for tickets per se, only a demand for a show, concert, trip etc that the ticket is a license for entry.
Let alone the fact that there are already no tickets for air flights anymore, they are all e-tickets.
To borrow from Levitt, relying on this logic kerosene.com would be a great domain … well, until electric light appeared or train.com before the advent of the motor car.
5 May, 2009 at 12:15 pm Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment
Celebratio launches in style
A large crowd gathered at the Cafe Royal, London on 12 February for the secureTicket launch of their new ticketing system – Celebratio – new to the arts and entertainment industry, but quickly learning theatrical flair.
The name of this new system is Latin for ‘audience’, as revealed in a humorous video of Leonardo da Vinci meeting the manager of the Roman Coliseum. It is hard to be innovative in ticketing systems these days, and sometimes just a fresh approach makes a difference. Tessitura achieved that with its joined-up thinking and not-for-profit network model. secureTicket is a subsidiary of Telsecure who bring a fresh perspective, largely from the world of banking, but with a huge input from frustrated venue managers, producers and promoters in Canada as well as the UK, which has led to Celebratio.
That industry input has largely focused on a system which gives even more reasons for wresting ticketing from the ticket agents and handling it in partnership with a new kind of supplier. For secureTicket, as the name suggests, security is writ large in their thinking, so Celebratio has multiple protections for touting and credit card fraud, offers print-at-home and mobile phone tickets with easy access control, and guaranteed instant real time authorisation of all transactions.
One benefit of this secure approach is an equally robust focus on customer relationship management (CRM), since the system needs to recognise every customer and track all their contacts and behaviours, so it enables ‘push’ and ‘pull’ marketing using both old and new technologies. And secureTicket guarantees that all customer data belongs to and is in the control of the venue.
The latest technologies means that this is a hosted ASP model of system, with secureTicket handling all the stress of the back-end, and geared up to sales and transaction volumes in the millions.
Fresh thinking brings a new style front end. Something looking remarkably like those ‘chip and PIN’ handhelds comes with a bigger screen, more keys, and can be used to sell tickets, accept and authorise card payments, print tickets, scan bar-codes, and fully inter-face with the ticketing system. This has been developed with Ingenico and is a GPRS, GSM and landline compatible device which can be truly mobile and always authorise card purchases live online in real time. The implications of this are considerable in terms of distributing access to ticket purchase, and, potentially, the demise of the formal box office and counter/window.
The back end also innovatively offers a whole Money Management set of tools and reports so that venues, producers and promoters can automatically obtain settlement with multi-party splits and all income is immediately available for distribution straight after redemption.
The new company is based in a rural business campus near Stockbridge in Hampshire where it has set up a 24/7 call centre, though the development team is based in Colchester. The call centre means that it can either handle all the telephone traffic for a box office or provide an appropriately answered overflow. secureTicket come to the market offering Everything – and then some. Of course we need to see it installed somewhere and working to evaluate just what it is offering.
Contact Sally Oakley, Sales and Marketing Director: sally.oakley@secureticket.biz Phone 01794302111 www.secureticket.biz
Patron Edge leap frogs forward
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
Pre-registration challenges
Glastonbury Festival joined those organisations determined to stamp out re-selling and ticket touts by requiring potential purchasers for this year’s festival to pre-register before 28 February 07. They must supply a photograph to prove their identity, which will appear on the ticket. One clear advantage is that families or a small group of friends planning to attend together in June will be able to purchase up to four tickets in one transaction, if all members have registered. The downside some commentators have identified, is that it will be harder for those wanting to assemble tickets to re-sell for corporate hospitality purposes.
Pre-registration opened on 1st February, and, though it is not first-come-first-served when tickets go on sale on 1st April 07, the registration website quickly crashed under the weight of traffic, soon put right.
Pre-registration is increasingly being argued for Internet ticketing, so that purchasers set up an account and log-in to buy tickets. The strongest argument is that this means more people complete their transactions. Some managers think this may also weed out those who use it as an ‘availability checker’, but that may also be a useful service which helps make sales. And for people with special needs, registration and recognition means they get privileged access to assistive technologies or booking wheelchair and companion spaces.
There also appears to be an increasing interest in the use of promotional codes, since they give off-line distribution techniques the chance to give people privileged access to offers online, in the way links from e-marketing campaigns easily lead to micro-sites with special deals. And in the same way, help track the source of responses.
Not all systems offer this with equal felicity. When are people asked to log-in on the website and do they need to have started Internet ticketing to do so? Can friends or members or subscribers log-in and then only see prices and deals specific to them? Do promotional codes only work when clicked into that event or do they automatically link straight from the code? Are wheelchair spaces available for booking online?
As the web converges with ticketing more and more, becoming central to ticketing and not just an additional channel, systems and their suppliers need to address these fundamental issues of design and usability.
Patron Edge leap frogs forward
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
Tessitura goes remote
Now with over 190 small, medium and large arts organisations using Tessitura in the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK, the Tessitura Network have launched RAMP, a Remote Access Managed Plan that brings Tessitura Software to the desktops of license holders via an Internet connection. The plan bundles server hardware, database administration services, backups and other vital services.
It is not clear whether this innovation is yet available in the UK but it offers the promising option to users of either the traditional approach of operating their own servers and networks or utilising the RAMP model which delivers Tessitura Software to both PC’s and Macs over an Internet connection.
Either way they get the full Tessitura one stop shop solution and the usual web interface that enables heavily customisable integrated websites offering real-time sales, contributions and other vital functions with no internet fees and no restrictions on website design.
Tessitura joins ENTA from GalatheaSTS in offering an ASP model which greatly eases the hosting and system management responsibilities of venues.
Contact Jack Rubin at Tessitura for more about RAMP: jrubin@tessiturasoftware.com www.tessiturasoftware.com For ENTA: www.galatheasts.com/solutions.aspx
