Your seat at a live event matters. Where a person sits – the balcony, orchestra, ticket booth or board of directors table – affects their vantage point and how they judge a night at the local performing arts center. Different stakeholders have their own goals. An attendee wants the event experience of a lifetime, a donor wants to support the arts and a venue wants to be their region’s most engaging organization of its kind. Satisfying these different goals can be a tricky – often underappreciated – balancing act. And that’s not accounting for your day-to-day tasks.
When you’re an organization’s box office manager, executive director, fundraiser or marketer, your duties often exceed your job description. On top of box office ticketing and selecting ticketing software, at smaller organizations – and especially at non-profits – you may be responsible for marketing and fundraising. And at bigger venues – such as higher education institutions – differing goals from different departments may work against one another, slowing progress towards your organization’s mission.
Managing a venue’s box office ticketing operations is never a simple task, and during low points – when there are barriers to in-person gatherings – getting enough tickets into the hands of eager, passionate customers to support yourself, your performers, staff and venue can feel downright untenable. So much of bridging the gap between the box office and ticket buyers; between goals of different stakeholders or departments; and between your organization today and its mission tomorrow; depends on whether or not your entire organization is oriented towards the same set of goals.
Give yourself, your team and organization a fresh vantage point with AudienceView Professional, an all-encompassing box office ticketing software for connecting more people with your performing arts center. Here’s how.
What is Box Office Ticketing Software?
Box office ticketing software is a digital platform that helps ticketing professionals, executive directors, fundraisers and marketers at live event organizations design, execute and monitor their ticketing processes, including selling tickets online.
Whether you’re selling tickets online or at your venue, a ticketing solution allows organizations, including performing arts centers, higher education institutions or attractions – such as museums, botanical gardens and pop-up exhibits – to design, implement and execute streamlined ticketing and sales processes from a centralized location. There are a spectrum of solutions, with some offering features to gather, store and analyze data of customer activity and sales, which allows organizations to make better, more informed decisions. (More on that later.)
On top of that, our ticketing software reduces tedious, time-consuming or duplicative tasks, freeing up your organization’s staff to focus their attention on more complex, pressing items, such as tasks that can’t be automated or providing exceptional service to your customers.
Here’s How a Professional Box Office Ticketing Software Performs
Over a lifetime, a performing arts center can host dancers, musicians, actors, comedians or the occasional traveling magician on their stage. As such, seats may be added, removed or reconfigured to accommodate shows of different sizes and events of varying needs. Audiences may skew younger, older or be mixed-aged. A majority of attendees may be traditional ticket buyers or devoted donors. And behind your stage, venue and website – underpinning every opening night or weekday matinee – is a box office ticketing software that also must adapt, adjust and contain your venue’s multitudes. When an amateur ticketing software won’t cut it, it’s time to get your performing arts center a professional platform to support a spectrum of business goals, live events and audiences.
AudienceView Professional is a box office ticketing software that’s designed for the performing arts. With our platform, it’s quick and easy to onboard your entire organization – no matter your business complexity or the number of different departments that will use it – onto a single, comprehensive platform for creating, selling and managing live events that is simply better.
Build events from templates, from scratch or with AudienceView Professional’s “copy event” feature, which allows you to duplicate basic price points, house scaling, promotions and member benefits with the click of a button.
When a customer returns for another event or makes another purchase, they can sign into their online account, or you can use AudienceView Professional’s “patron search function” to effortlessly auto-load their data into a transaction, saving your staff time, energy and effort. And our platform helps you maintain a tidy customer database by automatically identifying duplicate profiles, making de-duplicating simple and painless.
On top of that, optimize your sales with AudienceView Professional’s per-seat pricing, a more detailed approach than per-section pricing. You can also dynamically change your prices during the sales process to react to demand. When a new production’s set spills off the stage and alters your house’s seating layout, or you need to make additional room for social distancing regulations, use our “kill seat” function to quickly and easily remove unneeded seats.
Perfect Harmony: Box Office Ticketing & Customer Relationship Management
Before we dive in, let’s briefly unpack Customer Relationship Management. Also called CRM, it’s a business-related process that tracks customer interactions, such as emails, form fill submissions, phone calls, in-person interaction and social media, among others. Central to CRM is the gathering, storage and analysis of customer data, which is used to better understand customers and their behaviors, as well as how best to meet their needs. At the end of the day, a CRM system’s purpose is to improve the customer experience with your organization, stimulating customer retention and driving revenue growth.
AudienceView Professional takes a CRM-first approach with their box office ticketing software, one that empowers performing arts centers to gain an insightful customer-centric view of their organization. Whenever a customer or subscriber engages with your ticketing software, our platform generates a unique profile of that client, storing their data in one, centralized location, which can be shared with other members of your team or organization.
Our platform also offers reporting and analytics tools that inform business-related and data-driven decisions, such as building tailor-made event packages and subscriptions. And our CRM allows for patron tagging and audience segmentation, so you can dig deep and get the most from your information. With AudienceView Professional, you can deliver meaningful messages and offers and outstanding customer service every time you interact with your customers.
Box Office Ticketing Software & Marketing
Again, box office managers, executive directors, fundraisers and marketers responsibilities tend to exceed their job titles. Fortunately, AudienceView Professional is a flexible, adaptable ticketing platform that tackles a spectrum of challenges and tasks, such as marketing. By pairing our platform’s CRM features with your organization’s marketing strategy, teams become better informed to engage, grow and retain audiences by crafting laser-focused, personalized content.
And AudienceView is a white-label box office ticketing software, meaning our company’s name and branding do not appear to your customers, putting your organization front and center and creating a seamless, branded customer experience, no matter if they’re using a smartphone, tablet or laptop computer.
Boost Fundraising With Personalized Box Office Ticketing
What’s the price of a transcendent performing arts event? Naturally, there’s the cost of admission. But your patrons may want to contribute an extra financial boost to ensure the longevity of your venue and health of your organization. We’re speaking – of course – about the humble donation. Here’s the rub: an obstacle-filled donation process tends to dissuade even the most generous, loyal and passionate arts supporter. When venues operate a difficult-to-navigate box office ticketing software, or one that doesn’t accept donations at all, they leave behind essential funds from contributed revenue.
AudienceView Professional’s fundraising suite is designed for performing arts centers and attractions. Trusted by thousands of organizations, this suite gives fundraisers, box office managers, executive directors and marketers the tools to streamline and simplify their organization’s donation processes. Powered by prospect insights, enhanced donor profiles help teams engage and convert prospective donors, and manage relationships. Create, track and gauge the success of multiple fundraising campaigns at once. Give customers the option to add donations to their ticket purchases or set recurring donations – monthly, quarterly or annually. And finally, add a personalized touch to the donor experience by sending automated donation acknowledgement letters based on donor profiles – all from a single platform.
Custom User Experiences Before, During & After Box Office Ticketing
Most ticket buyer experiences don’t begin and end with the ticket transaction. They’ve got to plan for transportation, meals and getting the latest merchandise to represent their favorite venue or show. And each planning step presents an opening to create a custom experience, as well as up- or cross-selling opportunities. By tapping AudienceView Professional’s CRM functions, box office managers, executive directors or marketers can use a customer’s past purchase history or items they’ve added to their online shopping cart to pitch offers that tie back to the unique profile.
Additionally, ticket transaction data can be used to create a personalized experience, such as sending pre-event emails to ticket buyers. As an example, before a comedy show, you might send an email pointing attendees to bars that are open late into the night. Or before a children’s show, you send emails that list kid-friendly restaurants in the immediate area. Alternatively, data can inform your design of fixed or flexible packages for different subscriptions or memberships, such as family packages that offer additional sub-benefits. Not only are these data-driven services helpful, but they nurture ticket buyer loyalty to your organization, turning one-time ticket customers into repeat buyers and season subscribers.
Box Office Ticketing for Higher Education & Attractions
Attractions: Museums, Botanical Gardens & Pop-up Exhibits
Whether you’re a museum, botanical garden or pop-up exhibit, AudienceView is with you, and your ticket buyers, every step of the way. Attractions are unique experiences, which require unique features.
Here too, take advantage of our platform’s timed entry feature empowers teams to manage the flow of attendees. AudienceView makes it simple for both the organization and ticket buyers to navigate timed entry, reducing potential confusion on the day of the experience. Especially at a time such as this, it’s important that exhibits set the pace of entrants into their spaces.
A universal digital shopping cart gives ticket buyers the option to purchase multiple events, products or donations. Patrons can create a patron login to review their past purchase history. Additionally, when your organization works with a hotel concierge or secondary ticket agent, AudienceView creates unique links to process orders and track sales in real time.
Higher Education Institutions
Within higher education, our AudienceView Campus box office ticketing software helps colleges and universities stage arts, sports and campus life events. With a single, easy to use platform, every campus department can create, ticket and manage their own, unique events and event registration. Doing so creates a rich, robust database of ticket buyers, empowering every corner of the college or university to enjoy data-driven insights and make better informed decisions.
When it’s vital to monitor and cap crowd sizes, use AudienceView Campus’ real-time attendee tracking, to quickly and easily gather head counts. Furthermore, discover entry times to set the pace of attendees’ comings and goings.
Online transactions are powered by trust. Give your attendees peace of mind with a box office ticketing software backed by PCI compliance. AudienceView also integrates with your university’s preferred payment gateway. Onboarding couldn’t be easier. AudienceView Campus is user-friendly and doesn’t require tedious setup, training or implementation, allowing groups to rapidly start selling tickets. Furthermore, our platform easily integrates with your school’s authentication system, eliminating the need for unique logins and passwords.
Get Professional Box Office Ticketing Software
Where you’re sitting matters. When you’re an organization’s box office manager, executive director, fundraiser or marketer, give yourself the best vantage point of your business. Partner with AudienceView Professional for a premium box office ticketing software and CRM platform for growing revenue and audiences. Set your organization on a path to achieving its mission with a platform for ticketing, marketing and fundraising – no matter your organization’s size or business complexity. Gain invaluable insights into your audience and patrons to create custom experiences that they’ll remember long after the final bow.
Learn more about AudienceView Professional, our box office and ticketing software that is used by hundreds of live events organizations.