Ask My Frends - Box Office

Today we have someone that I rely on for all my ticketing questions. If you haven’t heard me say it before, you need to make friends in the Box Office because they are the one choosing your seats and can really help you out in a pinch. Tammy Enright is currently working for the Washington Nationals where she is one of the ticketing managers and handles ticket operations. Before that she was at Arena Stage where they won INTIX’s Outstanding Box Office Award in 2009, which is only giving to one box office in the world. She now heads the Box Office Manager’s Roundtable which is a local group that is part of INTIX. Beyond all her experience there is no one more kind than Tammy. I always loved running into her at Arena and hearing her Christmas music way before it was “time.” Here are Tammy’s thoughts from the Box Office.

"A View from the Box Office
When you think of your theater’s box office, you may think of those nice folks who answer the phones, stuff envelopes, & (most importantly!) process your comps.

Like most who have sought to make a living in theater, I’m sure you’ve paid your dues and sold some tickets. But some of us get sucked in, choose to stay, and make ticketing our careers. For those of us in the industry, it’s more than just processing comps.

Below, I’ve listed some common conversations I’ve been involved with and which are fairly universal across the theater and ticketing worlds. So if you’ve ever wondered what that self-proclaimed “ticketing dork” in your organization does, read on. In just these 4 examples, you’ll see how ticketing professionals work with, and think through, situations involving production, communications, development, IT, finance, marketing, and (always) the audience.

1. “For Cabaret, we’re going to replace the front row with café tables!”
· How do you communicate this to all the patrons, in all of the front row seats, for all 42 performances?
· What do you do if the café table seats 2 and you have a group of 3?
· Is the seating raked enough that the folks in the 2nd row can see?
· Are these now “premium seats” that we should charge more for?
· And my favorite question EVERY patron asked...“Do the chairs have arms?”

2. “The run of the show has been shortened by 2 weeks.” You need to move people into earlier performances. Who gets moved 1st and claims the best/most comparable seats?
· The person who renewed earliest?
· The person who’s been subscribing the longest?
· The 7-person group? They’re harder to just squeeze in just anywhere, so move them first, then handle the couples and singles, right?
· But wait…what if those singles attend together?
· And has Devo checked to see if there’s a major donor affected because maybe THEY should be moved first…?

3. “Tonight’s performance has been cancelled due to weather/gas leak/car accident/Emmy nomination.”
· If it’s rescheduled (i.e. you still have 42 performance of Footloose), you can keep people in their same seats. Configure your ticket scanners to accept barcodes from the original date. Adjust your reporting so that when royalties data is pulled for a range of dates, you get info from when the event was held, not the original date.
· If it’s cancelled (i.e. you now have just 41 performances of Footloose) you’ll need to reschedule and reseat everyone in other performances. Adjust your reporting, your capacities, average attendance, and maximum possible income. Figure out how to absorb and report on the price difference when that weekday-only STUDENT-priced ticket can only reschedule for a Friday night. And deal with situations where patrons cannot make another date or are from out of town.

4. “We’re thinking of doing dynamic pricing.” Think airline pricing - the fuller a flight, the higher the price. Easy to say, “Once we’re at X% capacity, we raise our prices $X.” How do you implement it?
· Is it PAID capacity or do comps factor in? (Can I comp out the house to raise single ticket prices?)
· If I raise my FULL price, do I adjust the half-price, student, military, senior, etc?
· How does this affect my group pricing? What if a group cancels and our capacity percentage goes down?
· How long will it take to run the capacity report? (Think 8 shows a week over a full season…that’s a lot of numbers to crunch!)
· How long will it take to turn off & on the new prices?
· How long for the web prices to clear the cache & go live?
· There are programs that interface with ticketing software (www.Qcue.net). Are they worth your investment? Or should you do it manually?"

Improving Sales

You won’t hear me talk about sports much, in fact my Dad gives me a hard time because I don’t know anything about them, but I do think we can learn a thing or two from them. Recently, I was having lunch with a good friend who went from managing a Theater Box Office to managing a Ticket Sales for Baseball. She clearly is very happy where she is but had a little bit of a learning curve going from having to deal with an audience to dealing with fans among other name differences among the two. But I asked if she were to come back to theatre today what has she learned that she would bring back with her. She listed several things but I think the biggest one was about group sales.

Instead of having groups come to them they go to the groups. They come up with special nights for groups. For instance “Ladies Night” where all the ladies can come to a game together. They have many of them and sell about 500 to 1,000 tickets for each event. They do mass emails to the people they need to target and create a webpage. Then they give a discount for buying into the group.

One event we do like that is “Young Professionals Night” where we invite local professionals to network and see a show. We target them through Facebook and email and get a fair turn out. What if we did the same for other groups. I could see us doing a “College Professor Night” or a “Drama Teacher Night.” Baseball doesn’t wait for large groups to approach them. They go out and approach and form there own large groups.