Nancy
(not her real name) and I do a lot of charity work, non-profit if
you prefer. Maybe you do too.
Whether
it's the United Way, a college alumni club, a charity Golf outing,
your kid's high school dance group, or the Boy Scouts spaghetti
dinner, most of us get called upon at some point, and there always
seem to be tickets.
If
you haven't had to deal with tickets count your blessings, you may
be in the 1%.
Brown Paper Tickets (BPT) takes about 95% of the hassle
out of the ticketing process. We're in the middle of running four
ticketed events so let's take a look the standard operating
procedure and what BPT brings to the
party while it's all really fresh.
The
four events make up the Kemper Center Murder Mystery Dinners Series.
Normally
you'd ask for volunteers, call a meeting, design tickets, go to the
printer's, get the tickets back, inventory and distribute the
tickets before you could even sell one. It can take weeks. One
person can set up BPT and have you selling
tickets online in under an hour.
Next
you have to contact all your ticket sellers to ask how it's going,
wait for responses to trickle in, follow up, and document your
sales. BPT sends you your choice of an
email with each sale, a weekly report, or a monthly report. You can
also login to view and print the reports anytime you want. BPT even knows that you're
likely to compile all this information in a spreadsheet for
analysis, and has one ready for you to download.
Finally
the money trickles in. You have to collect payments from all your
sellers, log them, deal with cash, checks, and credit cards, and
make many trips to the bank. BPT processes all the payments,
the buyer pays the credit card fee, you get one check within 10
business days of your event, and it's all documented right down to
the buyer.
If that's not enough, BPT collects, compiles, and
prepares names, addresses, phones, and email address.for download
in a spreadsheet. Something else you'd have to struggle doing
manually.
Shameless
plug: The Kemprer Center Murder Mystery Dinner Series links
to BPT so you can get tickets to
the February 7th event "Love
Pens a Deadly Verse" just in time for
Valentine's Day.
