Growing step by step

The demands an arts organisation places on its ticketing system will inevitably change over time, and one of the most difficult things to do when specifying a new system is to weigh up the pros and cons of investing in a lot of functionality at the point of purchase in order to ‘future-proof’ the organisation against possible needs it may have in the years to come. Like children’s shoes, it’s always important to buy with ‘room for growth’, but buy something that’s too big and you could trip up. For some theatres, even the prospect of an initial investment in a database server is daunting, and the very first step into ticketing needs to be a ‘cloud based’ ‘pay as you go’ system which is managed by the ticketing supplier and requires minimal staff involvement from the venue. But as time goes on that may change, and a system that grows with the user and enables investment decisions to be made as and when needs arise could be just the ticket.

At The Elgiva in Buckingham, IRIS Venue was installed as a ticketing and CRM system in 2008 and this offered all the functionality needed to support customer service, plus a web interface that clearly reflected the organisation’s corporate identity. Easy for staff to use, it enabled inexperienced staff to start selling tickets quickly, keeping training and management overheads low. Walk-up, phone sales and online transactions could all be processed efficiently. But ongoing upgrades by IRIS meant that, as time went on, The Elgiva could take a step-by-step approach to developing its ticketing services, adding new features such as social networking integration including Facebook and Twitter. The recent addition of a marketing module, IRIS Marketing, has been particularly valuable, enabling the ticketing database to be used for selective email and SMS text messaging campaigns, helping to make the organisation’s marketing efforts more efficient and effective. The ability to run straightforward reports, based on Purple Seven’s Vital Statistics system, has meant that the impact of marketing campaigns could be properly monitored too.

As for the future, IRIS’s new system functionality will continue to offer The Elgiva new options. A ‘membership’ facility will allow the venue to consider the merits of running a membership scheme, with a ticketing system that is able to offer member-only discounts and direct debit payments. It will also be possible for ticket packages to be bundled, with associated discounts for those who buy tickets for multiple events. Mark Barnes, manager of The Elgiva, said: “IRIS has proved to be a very sound investment for The Elgiva. Our catchment includes a lot of older people, so online ticketing wasn’t as important in the beginning as it is now that our email database is growing. Being able to upgrade the system and add the marketing functionality as we’ve gone along has been a great way of ensuring that we have only paid for features at the point when we actually needed them.”