Likelihood to Recommend Arts People is one of the best business decisions our theatre has ever made. It relieves staff of some of the tedious, time-consuming tasks while increasing the ease of selling tickets and subscriptions. That's our goal--to sell tickets easily, in a user-friendly manner at a reasonable cost. That's what Arts People allows us to do. It works for tiny venues (to greet each guest personally) as well as huge venues (ticket scanning solution). It is less appropriate for a one-time event. An Arts People user should have an ongoing series of events to take advantage of all the features (it even has a membership feature) and the time for training.
Read full review For those using the events module, NetCommunity is great, though if you do a lot of walk/run type of events where individuals sponsor other individuals, something like TeamRaiser might make more sense. If you don't have the staff resources for web developers dedicated to fundraising tasks, then NetCommunity is a great tool. It's not as customisable as an experienced programmer/developer might want, but it still has a lot of options. It also has a lot of nuance, and if you cannot make an investment of time or money into getting staff trained, it's not going to work out well.
Read full review Pros Their customer service is unsurpassed. Sometimes several folks will be working on different aspects of a complicated request, to address all the details. Once things are exactly the way I want it, as in season subscription package sales, a representative checks in to make sure we're satisfied. Only then is the ticket closed. They have a very comprehensive, full featured ticketing system for all types of events and venues. Their dynamic door list is our favorite feature--no static printed door lists for us. That helps us greet each patron with up-to-date information and check them off the list. While my box officers are doing that, I can be at a remote location and see in real time who has arrived. We can make collaborative decisions about, for instance, holding the curtain for a critics arrival or adding a chair for an unexpected guest of a ticket-holder. We can keep a couple of tickets on hold for box officer discretion to address those unforeseen ticket window requests. Great flexibility which allows us to be efficient while giving good customer service to our patrons. Even though the system is full-featured, it is not beyond the skills of those who considers themselves non-technical. Two sessions of training will get a box officer up-and-running. Because there are different levels of access, we don't have to worry about someone changing essential programming while they are checking in patrons. They made their ticket landing page look like our website, so people don't even realize that they have been taken somewhere else. Plus, the patron can easily navigate back to our actual site, seamlessly. Read full review Data integration with The Raiser's Edge - data which is collected in Blackbaud NetCommunity directly integrates with The Raiser's Edge interface and can be seamlessly downloaded into the CRM. Donation/Event/Membership registration - the product comes with out-of-the-box forms that can be used for these basic functions. They are flexible, but structured enough to integrate the data back to the CRM. Email marketing - constituents can be emailed directly from the Blackbaud NetCommunity platform by querying the data available in the CRM. Targeted email communications can be setup as well as ongoing subscriptions/newsetters. Content management - general tools to manage content are available. Business users can add/modify/delete this content without tremendous technical expertise. The content can also be shared across multiple websites - or A/B split tested to determine preference. Friendly URLs - the product allows for friendly URLs that are also more searchable on the major search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.). Read full review Cons Anything I've asked for, I've gotten so I don't see any need for improvement at the moment. Read full review When we have carding attacks on our payment gateway it is always a struggle to get all the players to work together and determine how to get us back up and running. ReCAPTCHA at the highest level is not supported, for example. From experience, the product has not been stable in the last couple years and all signs have been pointing towards a sunsetting of this product for years. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The only reason for this is due to the fact that we are only using the product for a specific purpose that is not directly tied to the newsletters. There are better products out there for what we are doing with grant processing. We will most likely move to a new software instead of renewing for our purposes
Read full review Usability The interface with Raiser's Edge and the many different ways our users can interact with the website are a big plus for us. Event registrations are our most popular transaction type and having this on line makes our lives much easier.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Product is stable is up 99.99% of the time. As a hosted customer, we do experience some minor downtime when routers or switches malfunction. We feel the downtime has been minimal and the communications around these outages has been good.
Read full review Performance Blackbaud NetCommunity uses .NET technology. It can be sluggish at times if not optimized, but overall we have been pleased with the performance when handling large volumes of traffic.
Read full review Support Rating Blackbaud NetCommunity and all of the Blackbaud products have a great support system. Blackbaud NetCommunity offers support through phone calls, chats, online, and email. Their response time is very quick and the support analysts work with you to resolve issues in a very timely matter. If they do not personally know the answer they will direct you to another support analyst that will be able to assist in a resolution.
Read full review In-Person Training As expected. Courseware was a nice reference guide.
Read full review Implementation Rating I truly wish that "0" was an option. I never really pin-pointed whether the implementation issues that we had were caused by Blackbaud, or if it was part of a larger issue that began in-house.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Eventbrite is better for single, one-time events but isn't as full-featured as Arts People.Brown Paper Tickets is clunky to use and harder to change globally when an event changes or adds shows.Vendini --never used it because when I researched 10 different ticketing companies, they were the least helpful. They didn't listen to our needs, and instead told us what we should have. They were much more expensive than Arts People as well.Constant Contact is truly great as a marketing tool. But their events feature was awkward and the payment method was Paypal. However, since it's integrated with Arts People, we can use Arts People for sales and Constant Contact for marketing.Read full review We tried to use this for a while and actually had different groups set up to begin implementing the interface into our computer but for some reason, we could not get a handle on it.
iMIS ended up winning out in the long run because it was easier for people of all generations to use and understand. People just preferred the layout and the usability so ultimately it was kept as our main system.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive - Our online vs phone call or in-person sales have increased steadily over the past 4 years since using Arts People. Less labor for us, more sales. Positive - People are buying their tickets earlier than they used to - to reserve a coveted seat in a possible sold-out performance. That makes planning our marketing easier--whether to offer HotTix or special coded offers for shows that have fewer sales. Negative - Some older folks still have problems with redeeming their subscription tickets for individual tickets without our personal assistance. We've been trying to pinpoint what that is--and Arts People helped us make a few adjustments. Sometimes people don't like to log in. That's one of the challenges of an integrated system. If the patron's profile changes in a way that impacts their subscription links, we need to step in. However, the overall time it has saved us in managing subscriptions is immeasurable. Read full review We were able to purchase a package integrating all types of Blackbaud products which integrate. We are able to update our desktop, mobile donation pages which allow us to take donations while having great support available at all times. The donation forms and email tools are not very visually appealing and user-friendly so this makes it difficult to implement and in return donors don't have a user-friendly experience. Read full review ScreenShots