Arts People vs. Brightly Event Manager™

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.

Incentivized

This is an ideal program for any school or district looking for a way to monitor room and maintenance requests. The digital routing availability will help ease the burden of paper copies and make it quicker for everyone to use and submit their needs. Schools with a variety of staff members are best suited, especially since when submitting a request you can designate those that need to be involved and what specific needs you have from facility to technology.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• You are able to designate whether you are submitting a maintenance request or a schedule request (for rooms).
• You can set recurring schedules for areas or rooms you may need weekly or monthly to be requested on a set day or time.
• SchoolDude autoroutes to the personnel you designate, taking out any physical paperwork involved.
• You can see your history of requests (both maintenance and schedule) in the database.

Incentivized

• Anything I've asked for, I've gotten so I don't see any need for improvement at the moment.

Incentivized

• The filter and ability to sort through your request history is a little difficult to navigate and can be glitchy if you are not sorting in the correct way.
• There should be a quicker and simpler way to verify whether a room is booked prior to scheduling.
• A cleaner, more simplistic look and navigation would go a long way.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

This is the only program I have used for the facility, maintenance, technology, and room requests. However, there are programs that include similar features. Frontline Professional Growth is a platform that includes digital forms and routing similar to SchoolDude. But it is a vastly more in-depth program with features that go beyond what SchoolDude is often used for.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Less printing and copying in a district.
• Quicker submitting and processing time.
• Able to track requests and see what is being used in the district.

Incentivized