First time attendance for many in the community
Even though Family Church in West Monroe, Louisiana, has been putting on their musical “Scrooge” for 12 years, they found that many people in the community attended last year’s performance for the first time. The church credits TicketU, their online ticketing provider, with helping to make their production more accessible to a wider audience of community members.
“With online ticketing, we actually sold more reserved seats than ever!” Cheryl Ogle of Family Church says. “In some cases we had people come to ’Scrooge’ for the first time because we offered online tickets. They said they were more likely to get a ticket online than come up to the church office and get one.”
“In addition, the professional vibe that online ticketing gave our production was a benefit,” she says. “For those who had never been to a production, the website sent a signal that this is a professional production.”
Theater for the family and community
With an average attendance of 750 people per Sunday, Family Church is focused on building Biblical founded families. The importance of family to spiritual well-being is one of the reasons the annual production of “Scrooge” is so important to the church.
“Our productions allow the entire family to come out and enjoy the theater,” Olge says.
The 2009 production marks the 12th anniversary of Family Church’s “Scrooge” musical. With eight performances over a two-week period, having an online ticketing system has been very helpful to Family Church.
“Using TicketU was by far one of the best decisions that we’ve made for ‘Scrooge.’ TicketU worked with us to make sure the tickets looked how we wanted them to look, the seating for our venue was correct and all of the information for the web site was correct. Once those preliminary decisions were made, the rest was a breeze.”
Connecting with your patrons
Ogle says that one of the most beneficial aspects of TicketU is the ability to follow up with patrons after the event and enable families to give feedback about “Scrooge’s” impact on their lives. TicketU gathers pertinent information from patrons when purchasing their tickets online. This allows for follow-up communication and notifications.
“This allowed us to send ‘Thank You’ notes out daily to all that attended the event,” Ogle says. “It also has helped us this year as we are using those e-mails to advertise for this year’s performance. Many in the community replied to those ‘Thank You’ e-mails with what “Scrooge” meant to them and how much they enjoyed it as a family. It was very gratifying to read all those comments and know that we are making a difference.”
Tracking tickets with no guess work involved
For the first 10 years of their production of “Scrooge,” Family Church used its own “in house” system for distributing/selling tickets.
“Our ‘in house’ system worked, in terms of having each performance full, but it took a lot of manpower to make the event happen and our tracking for how many tickets were ‘reserved/sold’ was always, at best, sketchy,” says Ogle.
Ogle says TicketU allowed volunteers to track how many tickets were sold for each performance with no guessing involved.
Professionalism, accountability, ease-of-use, and increased visibility — these are all benefits TicketU brought to Family Church to help make an annual event even more successful.
