Arts People vs. BuzzCast

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

BuzzCast is great for large, complex online events - especially during the pandemic when it's been hard or impossible to gather folks in person. If you only need a smaller group of 5 or 10 people, BuzzCast is probably overkill. Once you have lots of people / multiple sessions, or want to capture and save presentations for later, you'll want to start looking at BuzzCast.

• 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

• The BuzzCast platform was excellent in every way.
• The platform is sleek and easy to use, both the backend and the UX.
• The entire team at BuzzCast is supportive and works hard to make your event a complete success.
• Building and deploying the conference was made easy by the expertise and hard-working BuzzCast staff.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Within the platform it would be great to have direct access to make edits changes (I believe this functionality is in process)

• 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

BuzzCast platform has the most amount of features that our events require (public chat/private chat, breakouts, auto-scrolling agenda). The entire platform is built and designed so that it's intuitive for our viewers and they are shown exactly how to operate the platform in under a minute. The quality of the stream is superior. The BuzzCast team is great to work with and are true partners who are all solution-oriented.

• 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

• BuzzCast enabled one of my clients to deliver an investors' meeting that resulted in a $10 billion increase in market cap