We have had a fabulous experience with SEAT YOURSELF. They do General admission and reserve seating options and custom receipts are available. The online management platform is easy to navigate and their support staff is really, really responsive and helpful. I've never emailed David a question that he didn't respond to within the hour.
And on the user end, it took a little while for student and audiences to adjust, but once they did, they loved it. If you choose to do it, email me separately and I'll explain how we set up our lobby to efficiently handle everyone who has or hasn't purchased tickets ahead of time and those patrons who forgot to print their tickets. We still sell tickets at lunch for cash or check and that's what we call our student discount, because they don't have to pay the service charge for each ticket. We also charge less for advance sales and more for at the door to encourage advance sales. This system has increased both our physical number of patrons at the productions and our gate receipts.
So much better than managing all this by hand and you are protected with your bookkeeper because you can account for each transaction.
The only caveat is that you don't collect your gate money until the end of your show. If you don't have a budget to cover your production costs as you build and rehearse, you won't have the trickle of revenue that comes from pre-sales, or at least, a significantly lesser amount.
Checks arrive within the week of making an online request for disbursement.
Hope that helps. If you want to see how the platform works for a user perspective, we've got a general admission show up now, DNA by Dennis Kelly, at www.eastreservations.org.
Best of luck.
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Hope Hynes Love
Theatre Director
Chapel Hill NC
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-24-2015 10:23
From: Corey Ragan
Subject: Online Ticketing System
Good morning everyone!
I am a first year teacher at Groveport Madison High School. I am currently working on tickets for our fall production of Leading Ladies. I would like to make the switch to an online ticketing system as we build our program moving forward. Do you any of you have any stories or experiences with online ticketing systems? I would love to hear good/bad experiences so that I can make the best decision of what system to go with.
Thanks!
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Corey Ragan
Theatre Teacher/Director
Groveport Madison High School
Groveport, OH
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