TICKETING

In planning your marketing activities, you need to remember to decide on a date when your tickets will go on sale. It will be important that tickets are available as soon as your marketing goes out so that customers can call, or go online or travel to buy them from the box office.

In the lead up to deciding on this date, you will need to make decisions about how to sell tickets for your events. Again, thinking about your audience, or using data that you have gathered from them will help you to decide on which ways they would be most comfortable to purchase their tickets. If you can offer more than one way of buying tickets, they can do which ever is easiest for them.

Some events only sell tickets on the day, which prevents the need for advance selling, but does mean that you will not know how many people plan to come to your event and will also mean that the money from your ticket sales will not be available to you until the day of the event. Selling tickets in advance can be a real help for ensuring a smooth cash flow for small organisations, especially since a lot of the preparation for your event has to be paid for in advance. You will also be able to find out how your sales are going, and secure a paid-up audience who will still come along if the weather is not so good. If you haven't sold any tickets in advance and it rains on the day, you are much less likely to get an audience.

SELLING IN ADVANCE
You could sell your tickets yourself, with volunteers taking responsibility. Having one central place - an office or a lead volunteer's house with one contact number will help people. You will need to print some tickets and decide whether people can pay in advance, or reserve tickets and how you will give the tickets out either on the night, or in advance.

You can also talk to local shops and see if they would be able to sell tickets for you (you could offer them a small advert in your publicity or out their logo on your posters if they help you).  You can give them a certain number of tickets and sell the others yourself.

NB: It is very important to find out what the capacity of your venue, or site is going to be. You can use the health and safety section to guide you on this. You must not sell any more tickets than you have space for, so it's good to make sure you only print what you need. You also need to decide on whether your tickets will be specific to seats within the auditorium if you are using one, or whether people can sit where they would like.

There is a printing firm in Bridgwater who print tickets http://www.alphaprintanddesign.co.uk/
or in Bristol http://www.outofhand.co.uk/printing/tickets/index.php
and there are some national firms who will send your tickets to you http://www.piranprint.com/ and http://www.24-7tickets.co.uk/

All designers will be able to design and print tickets for you, or alternatively you may wish to consider having wristbands instead of printed tickets. If cost is an issue and you decide not to issue tickets, then you would need to have people on the door or at the entrance to the event to do hand-stamping. Remember if an event is held at licensed premises but allows entrance to both under and over 18s they must be clearly identified with either different colour wristbands or hand stamps.

WORKING WITH A LOCAL VENUE

As well as using local shops, many arts events work with a local arts venue, like a theatre and use their box office systems to sell either all, or some of their tickets. There is usually a charge for doing this, or an agreement of in-kind support, unless the venue is involved in the event in someway. The box office can sell tickets, and then the tickets are either sent out to customers, or they are given to your event so that you can hand them out on the day.

The benefits of this system are that the box office at the venue deal with all of the money, they can take credit card payments and your audience will be able to visit them in person should they wish to.

SOFTWARE PACKAGES AND ONLINE SOLUTIONS

If you would like to use a computer system yourself to sell tickets, there are several options. With all of the computer software and online packages, it is important to find out whether you get access to customer data, how and when you access the ticket sales money and what the fees might be to yourselves or your customers (for example, for making credit card transactions).

Software packages

• Nortech Software offer a Windows desktop package for box office tickets that will provide you with event reports following your event. http://www.nortechsoftware.co.uk/

Online ticketing

There are some on-line ticketing programmes on offer that you could also use. A substantial list of these is included below. Please note that their fees and product offer may change and the fees below are purely indicative.

• We've Got Tickets, www.WeGotTickets.com Fees: 10% of the face value of your ticket. No postage - tickets by e-mail only.
• Quay Tickets www.quaytickets.com, Fees: 10% of the face value of your ticket. 85p postage payable by customer for sending out tickets.
• Tix Mob, www.tixmob.com, Fees: 10% of the face value of your ticket. No postage - tickets by e-mail or SMS.
• Paypal, www.paypal.com Fees: credit card fees 1%- 3% of face value of sales. Online transactions. You need to input the link to your own website.
• Ts.com, www.ts.com Free service, but Pay Pal credit card fees.
• Ticket Web (subsidiary of Ticket Master), www.ticketweb.co.uk
• See Tickets www.seetickets.com
• Ticket Master www.ticketmaster.com

Integrated online box office solutions: 'real time' ticket selling

This option is more expensive, but transactions can be done in real time from your own box office as well as a customer buying online without the risk of overselling. Suppliers include:

www.ts.com

www.tickets.com

Resource
The Derbyshire Festivals Toolkit has a section on ticketing and a downloadable guide to developing a box office system for small organizations. http://www.artsderbyshire.org.uk/projects/toolkit/marketing/4-7-Ticketing.html

MERCHANDISING
Merchandising can be a way of generating some extra income, so you may wish to sell things like t-shirts, mugs, pint glasses, souvenir brochures, posters etc. However, bear in mind that you will need to have extra volunteer capacity for a stall and to organise the stock. Make sure that the merchandising is developed as part of your overall branding.