Arts People vs. Zoom Events & Webinars

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

Zoom is well-suited for any service-based business that relies on face-to-face communications, whether for client meetings or external sales calls. Zoom also provides a good platform for internal team meetings to discuss creative ideas or for one-on-one sessions. Zoom is also excellent for larger webinars where you need to present to larger audiences.

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

• Zoom calendar integration is a great way to see what calls are upcoming
• Ease of use for screen sharing and video call settings
• Zoom Workplace is reliable at blocking out external noise that should be muted from actual conversation taking place in calls

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• I wish there were more polling options available in Zoom in general, and this extends to both webinar polling and post-webinar surveys. Could certainly do with a more robust polling feature set.
• Setting up Registration for Zoom webinars can be very tricky, and I usually advise against webinar registration. The fact that users have to manually download an .ics to add it to their O365 calendars after registering means lots of issues with users attempting to join after registering early.
• I would have complained about lack of breakout rooms for webinars, or the fact that the practice room can't be turned back on after it was turned off, but Zoom recently implemented webinar breakout rooms plus the Backstage feature, so both of these common complaints are now fully addressed!

Incentivized

We will be renewing with Zoom as long as it continues to meet our needs for client and lead outreach needs in a robust manner. With little error and an easy to use interface, Zoom has met our needs and exceeded our expectations. The cost is right and with a short learning curve, Zoom has been an easy decision to make and maintain.

Incentivized

Zoom Events is complex, but gets "almost easy" with experience and good guidance. I tell people, "Hosting a meeting is like driving a car; hosting a webinar is like driving an 18-wheeler; and hosting a Zoom Event is like flying a commercial airliner." You need experience, training, and ongoing guidance to be good at Zoom Events. Zoom has staff that knows everything there is to know about Zoom Events, but finding them and reaching them isn't easy. There aren't many consultants out there that are affordable and experienced.

Incentivized

Zoom [Video Webinar] has online web portal where user can take control of the meetings and their settings. It provides details of all the meeting happened and also provides participants list. It has support for webinars and recording also. Zoom [Video Webinar] gave special cloud permissions for paid users also from web portal and that can help in saving disk space.

Implementation was very feasible during our initial usage of the Zoom after COVID-19.

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

We moved away from MS Teams due to several factors: 1)The ability to have a calendar reminder pop up for the upcoming webinar. 2)The ability to have Zoom automatically send a customized one hour reminder email to everyone who registered. 3)Webinar templates that speed up the setup of each of our webinars. 4)Integrated polling and collaboration tools.

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

• Prior to Zoom, the best way to train was to travel to their business. Or to do it remotely, it was to allow multiple hours and allocating time to help them set up the technology. It was a mess. We were able to shave travel costs/technology implementation costs.
• We no longer have to waste time playing technology ping pong, bouncing between different platforms. Zoom Video webinar just works.
• My tech team used to have to set up the webinar events, because of how complicated GoToWebinar can be. Zoom makes it easy that anyone can do it.

Incentivized