Client spotlight: A look at how the National Museums NI use Ticket Tailor across 4 magnificent museums

Client spotlight: A look at how the National Museums NI use Ticket Tailor across 4 magnificent museums

The National Museums NI are a group of four museums, with the impressive achievement of being Northern Ireland’s premier cultural and tourist destination.
Each of their museums showcases a fantastic collection of objects, guiding visitors through folk history, transport, art and more.

During some pandemic downtime, they rolled out Ticket Tailor across all four sites, to help them with their entire ticketing journey. From selling tickets to checking in customers, it’s been great to see how successful the National Museums NI have been since reopening their doors.

We talked to Ian Cameron to find out how to run such a successful family of museums.

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The best way to sell charity event tickets

Why use Ticket Tailor?

Charities were some of Ticket Tailor's earliest clients, and we still get warm and fuzzy thinking about how much money we've saved them on ticket fees. In fact, we still offer a 30% discount for registered charities because we're committed to providing the best value for money that we possibly can.

Looking for a reliable, effective and low-cost option for ticket sales?

Most online ticketing services will charge you a flat fee plus a percentage of each ticket's price. And that can be cost-effective... sometimes. But not often - and that's why we like to do things a little differently.

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Because we did the math...

And you're probably being charged too much. Most of the time it actually makes more sense to pay $25 (the cost of one cheap ticket) and then be able to sell as many tickets as you like for a month, instead of paying a fee for each successful sale.

grateful-262x300That goes double if you're running a reasonably large event or selling expensive tickets. Charities have a hard time using traditional ticket services; the money from customer purchases should be going towards a good cause, so the lost slice of each sale has direct repercussions.

Many companies actually market this charging method as "free ticketing" - in fact, the relatively high costs are simply being passed on to the customer.

Ticket Tailor began with a relatively simple idea: Sell as many tickets as you like and pay a flat monthly fee for each event you're running.

Suddenly charity balls, school events and donation drives don't lose 2.5% plus change on every ticket. And we've helped pass on these significant savings to charities like the Motor Neurone Disease Association, the Stroke Recovery Fund and Student Pride UK.

Sound good so far?

Well don't take out word for it - sign up for a free account and try it out. Or check out our features list. We make it easy to sell tickets directly from your site, so there'll be no need to transfer potential customers away to another address. Just drop our ticketing widget onto one of your pages and you can start selling tickets immediately.

We believe in being honest and straightforward with pricing; you won't be asked for a cent until you actually sell a ticket. There are also no contracts or hidden fees, just a chap behind a desk who'll politely ask you to pay after you make your first sale. And when you're done and want to stop selling tickets, you can turn off your subscription just like that. We'll even credit the remainder of the month in store credit if you close sales early. Can't say fairer than that!

“Ticket Tailor saved us a lot of money and a lot of time this year. National Student Pride 2015 was our hugely popular 10th anniversary, and, as most students will tell you, it went brilliantly.”

Tom Guy – President: National Student Pride

“Ticket Tailor makes it quick and easy to sell tickets online. The customer service is great, they don’t take a cut on each transaction, and there’s 30% off their monthly plans for charities. All round a great service for PTA events.”

Tanja Kent Collis Primary School PTA

5 Reasons to Ditch the Cash for Your Next PTA Fundraiser

There’s more to online ticketing than just intrinsic convenience - especially for schools and parent-teacher associations, when time, energy and funding are already at a premium. In the same way that email has more or less superseded letter writing, the use of self-service ticketing has generally replaced the physical box office for event booking. This hasn’t happened by chance either. The ability to sell tickets online has brought a wealth of advantages to what was once a lengthy and sometimes haphazard task for organisers as well as customers. It might not be obvious at first glance, but using an online ticketing service for fundraising events is actually a pretty neat idea.

Setting the scene

Let’s imagine a school fair, organised to raise money for a bursary scheme or to improve a library’s book selection. Kids will love it, but actually making the fair run is a burden for parents and organisers alike, not least because of one particular irritation: physical cash.

Cash is a pain. It’s a pain to carry around, but you’ll need it to pay for activities and to make change at stalls. Cash also needs supervision; it can get lost, it can be stolen, and, worst of all, it has to be properly managed and banked at the end of the day.

Now let’s imagine what would happen if you ditched cash altogether, and sold tickets (or coupons) for individual stalls before the event. On the day you issue buyers with a chit listing their total coupons and cross one off after each activity. Or you can hand out coupons to each purchaser based on how many tickets they've bought, and each stall or activity provider can take their due during the event!

PTA ticket blog post

The result?

  1. You won’t need to fiddle around with cash

You won’t need to allocate cash floats for each stall. Children and their parents don’t have to look for change machines, or worry that they have enough money with them. There will be no need to collect and carry that money to the bank at the end of the day.

  1. You won’t need as much security

The days of worrying about thieves or unattended cash going missing are gone. Attendees have paid online by card and the money is already in the PTA’s PayPal account. If the money had to be counted, you also wouldn’t need to assign observers to make sure it was all there. Except...

  1. You don’t need to count money

Because you’ve taken advantage of the wonders of e-commerce and computing power. In fact, you know how much you’ve made before the fair has even started. And what’s more…

  1. You know where that money came from

Yup. Thanks to the marvel of analytics, you’ll be able to see who bought what and when. Instead of having to figure out which stalls at the fair were a success and which weren’t (by painstakingly counting their takings), you can look at a graph.

  1. You can automate administration

You won’t have planned on mailing out tickets or estimating attendees - and you'll never have to. Customisable emails are sent out automatically right after each purchase is made, complete with useful reminders (“We begin packing up at 7pm”). You’ll even be provided with a check-in list filled with attendees’ details and purchases, ready for printing and distribution.

And so...

If you do decide that an online ticketing system makes sense for your next PTA event, we’d humbly submit that Ticket Tailor is an especially good fit. That’s because we don’t take commission or per-ticket fees, meaning that you won’t lose a percentage of each ticket sold. You can find out more about our pricing here, or if you’d like to chat about the services we offer, just write to hi@tickettailor.com.

8 benchmark WordPress themes for ticketed events

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How important is event presentation?

Very. Until your attendees actually arrive, the only information they have to go on - aside from word of mouth - is the information you provide. Presentation is key, but not all themes are suitable for every kind of event. That’s why we’ve put together a showcase of the best 'standards' in each category.

All of these are responsive, mobile-ready designs that work well with the Ticket Tailor WordPress plugin

Khore - Conference & Exhibition

khore

Khore is an advanced conference and exhibition theme that's designed to look fantastic on mobiles. It's clean, clear and attractive, and comes with a host of features including schedule and session management, online ticket sales, maps, a countdown clock and 8 different language translations.  If you're looking for a flexible and responsive event theme that caters to mobile users, you're unlikely to do better than Khore.

Event Builder - Directory

ebuilder 3

Event Builder is a customisable events directory that lets other users add their events to your own choice of categories. It supports maps and forms, pricing plan creation, custom filters, and a vast array of templates, colours and pages. It's compatible with Mailchimp, and users can seamlessly sell tickets to their events from the site itself, using the Ticket Tailor WordPress plugin. Backed by expert designers, Event Builder is intended to be the most universal directory theme around.

Soundboard - Bands & Artists

soundboard

Soundboard looks brilliant and works like its namesake, effortlessly amplifying your music, brand and aspirations to reach a wider audience. It's easy to get running and simple to use, but offers a wide range of customisation options and display features. This theme includes support for upcoming tour dates, tour management, pictures and videos. It is also JW Player ready, and has some of the fastest and most helpful support around.

Biosphere - Charity & Environment

biosphere

Biosphere is a fresh, honest and colourful theme that works well for any number of charitable causes. The homepage is modular and contains a variety of event management and social media options. Donations can also be taken through the site and the theme is  BuddyPress ready, with support for other language translations.

Universe - Schools & Education

universe

Universe is an ideal theme for scholastic institutes, from universities and schools to educational workshops and events. Like other featured themes, this one is fully responsive, but its also especially easy to customise thanks to its very clear presentation and widgetised homepage. With googlemaps and Mailchimp integration, several predefined skins and detailed documentation, educators can't go wrong with this theme.

Gameplan - Gym & Sports

gameplan

Gameplan has won several awards, and for good reason. It has a drag and drop page builder, excellent event calendar and tons of customisation options. Elements can also be quickly and easily added to the theme via more than 44 shortcodes, and it looks great on mobile and Retina displays.

LEARN - Courses & Workshops

LEARN

LEARN is for anyone who wants to arrange, market and sell courses or workshops online. Aside from several homepages, an event calendar and teacher profiles, it also includes a login and registration system for attendees. There are plenty of customisation options to play with, lots of extra content pages and at $16, this theme is extremely affordable.

Mercurial - Festivals & Events

mercurialMercurial is a great one page theme for any kind of recurring event or festival. Seamless parallax scrolling, 17 shortcodes and plenty of customisation options make it quick and easy to set up your webpage. Ideal for festivals and image-heavy events, this theme's presentation style is persuasive and bold, making it excellent for online ticket sales.

How CoLab Theatre Sell Tickets Online

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At Ticket Tailor, we aim to provide the best online ticketing service that we can. We want to help our clients sell tickets online and make the experience as simple, yet effective for them as possible. With great features such as MailChimp integration, auto-hiding tickets and Facebook integration, we provide an online ticketing service that works for you.

When it comes to telling you about the benefits of the services that we offer, who is better placed than our clients? Bertie Watkins of CoLab Theatre shared with us why they use TIcket Tailor to sell tickets online.

Sell tickets online

Bertie, what can we expect from a CoLab Theatre production?

"We want to create completely new, exciting and unique experiences for our audiences to live in. Using technology, our mission is to create fun and engaging experiences for absolutely everyone, utilising locations around London, we strive to bring them alive using old, new and borrowed stories.

We create experiences that people have never gone through before. We push the boundaries, not of people’s inhabitations but how far we can take them into other worlds. We create new and exciting shows with some of the countries most exciting playwrights, producers, directors and actors. Collaboration is key and we are keen to continue to grow with the country's best creative minds and companies. With a growing network of collaboration, CoLab will continue to make the best work possible.

We strive to create experiences you will never forget - this is CoLabs mission."

CoLab Theatre combines technology with theatre for an immersive experience. What was the inspiration behind that?

"It started out by wanting to make audiences into characters within the narrative we're telling them. Audiences are changing with new styles of theatre. They're investing so much more and I thought it would be fantastic to try and create a way to give them more agency within a narrative. It means they can go from being a passive audience member to becoming an active (or passive if they choose) member of the story.

Obviously it's a massive challenge, particularly as you need to have live audiences to really try new things with. Luckily it's an incredibly fun process to have and technology makes it much easier.

Sell tickets onlineMobile technology is such a fantastic, advanced tool that we are all completely competent at using. We use them every day and they are almost essential to every day life. So why should we turn them off to see a show? Why shouldn't we transform them into weapons to gain more narrative? Our ultimate aim with technology is to seamlessly integrate it into theatre so people don't even necessarily notice when they're being fed narrative live in front of them or through a screen. They should both be working in tandem to compliment each other."

What events have you got coming up?

"We have a lot going on this year.

Unfortunately we've got a lot of shows that we are cannot speak about yet as they're 'top secret' - ironically they're spy shows...

However we are allowed to talk about The Exchange - following on from the Fifth Column, the Exchange reveals to the audiences an invisible war between the ETF and Astra. It pioneers our new form of theatre - Action Theatre. Audience pit themselves against the ETF and try bring them down from within. It's going to be a massive amount of fun."

Sell tickets online

How has Ticket Tailor helped you sell tickets online?

"Ticket Tailor has been the exact ticketing website I've been looking for ever since becoming a producer. The best thing about it is the customer service. Even if there is a problem, you know it will be solved quickly. It's incredibly easy to use and the dashboard has all the information you need right in front of you. I couldn't be happier with a ticketing system.

Finally, the most important thing it is that it's fair. The pricing means that smaller companies like CoLab can create a show and not sting or be stung by ever increasing booking fees."

Find out more about CoLab Theatre and their unique productions on their website.

We pride ourselves on our customer service so it's great to hear that our clients know how hard we work for them. It's important for us to provide a fair pricing structure for events of all shapes and sizes: from small corporate events to festivals, Ticket Tailor is here for you.

Why not take our two-minute tour to find out more?

Synchronise your ticket buyers with MailChimp

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Whether it's sending a reminder about the upcoming show or promoting the upcoming calendar of events, keeping in touch with ticket buyers is an important part of every event organisers job. MailChimp is a great email marketing tool that's used by many event organisers. It enables you to design and send out email campaigns to your mailing lists.

With a new MailChimp and Ticket Tailor integration you can now automatically synchronise all your ticket buyers with a mailing list in MailChimp.

MailChimp Sell Tickets

MailChimp Sell Tickets

Connect your MailChimp account to Ticket Tailor and whenever someone buys a ticket they will automatically be added to your chosen mailing list in MailChimp. In addition we send over the name of the event the person bought tickets for which makes it easy to target particular ticket buyers.

Synch MailChimp with ticket sales

Synch MailChimp with ticket sales

Read more about how to configure MailChimp with your Ticket Tailor account.

We plan to integrate with more of your favourite apps. If you have any suggestions please email them over to hi@tickettailor.com or drop them in the comments below.

Sell tickets for private events

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Sell tickets to a private party

We are excited to let you know that Ticket Tailor now lets you sell tickets online for private events with the addition of 2 key new features:

  1. Password protect your events and
  2. Hiding events from your box office.

Read our guides below on how these great new features work, and if you have any feedback please get in touch via email or using the comments section below.

Password protect your ticket sales

This features allows you to set an access password for your event page. Once configured, only those with the access password can access the event page to purchase tickets.

When editing an event click "Advanced options", and check the box that says "Password protect my event page". It will then ask you for a password, so enter whatever you want your customers to enter as the event page password.Password protect event page

Then, when your customers come to purchase tickets they will be prompted for a password before being able to purchase tickets:

Password protect ticket sales

Hiding events from your box office

Your box office page will list all the events you are selling tickets for. Sometimes you may be running private events that you don't want anybody on your box office to see, in which you can simply hide it.

When editing your event, click 'Advanced options' at the bottom of the form and tick the box that says 'Hide this event from my box office listings'. Then the only people who will be able to get to your event is those with the link.

We've been asked for these features a lot as they are very useful for selling tickets to private dinner parties, college reunion parties, office christmas parties and many more. We hope you find them useful, but if you have any feedback please don't hesitate to contact us.

How to Sell Tickets on Squarespace

Squarespace has become one of the most popular website platforms around thanks to its user-friendliness and vast array of appealing themes. It’s great for event sites, with lots of slick one-page templates to choose from, alongside more complex themes that accommodate maps, performer profiles, and basically anything else you’d need to make a fantastic online home for your event.

In this quick tutorial, we show you how to sell tickets from your Squarespace website. We’ll use Ticket Tailor as an example event registration platform that you can embed into Squarespace, but you can follow the same instructions for other registration platforms that are integrative with Squarespace too. You’ll just need to get the embed widget for whichever platform you’re using.

Let’s get started.

How to sell tickets on Squarespace

Ticket Tailor is a great option for selling tickets on your Squarespace website. You can simply set up all your event details on Ticket Tailor and then embed your ticketing widget in to your Squarespace site like so:

1) Decide where you want to add the booking widget

First up, you’ll need to decide where on your website you want people to be able to buy tickets from. This might be on a separate page or a certain section of your site if you’re using a one-page design.

For this demo we've created a page on our example website called "Buy tickets".

2) Edit the content area and click on the grey handle where you want your ticket booking widget to appear

Next, make sure you’re in editing mode on the area you want people to be able to buy tickets from. Click on the grey handle (like in the image below). This will open up a panel of various options.

 3) Click on the code option and it’ll invite you to add in some code

Click the small code icon on the panel of options. A box will then appear with the heading "EDIT CODE". This is pre-filled with "<p>Hello, World!</p>", which is what we want to replace with our Ticket Tailor (or other event registration platform) widget code.

 4) Get your widget code from your Ticket Tailor or other event registration account

Get ticket widget code for Squarespace

Get ticket widget code for Squarespace

From your Ticket Tailor account click "Box office setup", and then click "Website Embed Codes". You can click "Edit widget options if you want to choose which event you want to show and pick from some styling options. Finally highlight HTML code in the block on the right-hand side and click "Edit > Copy" from your browser.

5) Paste the code in to your Squarespace code block

Paste Code in to Sqaurespace

Paste Code in to Sqaurespace

Delete the existing code in the block and paste your widget code there instead. Click “Save" on the code editing and then click “Save again” for the content block you are editing.

6) Reload the page to preview

When you reload the widget will load on the page and if the page is public then your visitors will be able to buy tickets directly from your Squarespace website.

The widget is responsive so it will naturally work great on mobiles too.

Squarespace buy tickets on mobile

Squarespace buy tickets on mobile

That's all there is to it. Get in touch if you get stuck and we will be glad to help: hi@tickettailor.com.