Neo-Ticketing is our brand new project, running from September 2024 to September 2024, exploring new ways to price tickets for our events.
The idea is simple, with the opportunities now available with our on-line box office system, does it work better for everybody to allow our prices to “flex”, rather than setting one fixed price months before the event goes on sale?
Will we sell more tickets?
Will you get a better deal?
Will our artists earn more?
You’ve probably come across something a bit like this before, maybe buying airline tickets, or if you’re a bit global – baseball tickets. Easyjet, for example, make a number of tickets available at very low prices early to stimulate sales or reward advance purchase customers, whilst letting the price rise steadily over time. Their prices also change according to levels of demand or time of year (don’t worry, we won’t be charging you to bring in a bag…. hmmm).
So we’re experimenting with three different ideas that do this kind of thing;
Rising Prices
The price of your ticket will start very low, as much as 50% lower than we would normally charge, and increase slowly over time to a maximum of 50% more than we would normally charge. So the earlier you buy your ticket, the better deal you get.
Moving Prices
The price goes up AND down right up until the event, depending on how many tickets are sold and how quickly you’re buying them. So if the price is higher than you expected, you can always check back tomorrow.
Random Price Crash
Every now and then, perhaps to stimulate interest, perhaps to reward you for following us on Facebook or Twitter, perhaps just for fun on a Friday night, we’ll crash the price right down and see what happens. So if you hear us say “Tickets for New Years Eve are 10p for the next 10 minutes”, get in there!
The Neo-Ticketing project is run in partnership with Monad Software (who built our existing box office) and Royal Holloway University of London (whose Economics department are devising the experiments and crunching the numbers), and is supported by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.
So…
We;re very excited about Neo-Ticketing and really looking forward to seeing how it works. We have a Tumblr blog at neoticketing.tumblr.com where we’ll post loads of updates and project news. Plus, we’d love to hear what you think about any of it – did it work for you? Have we missed something? Who else does it? So please get in touch using the contact form at the bottom of this page.
About the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts
The Digital R&D fund for the Arts is a £7 million fund to support collaboration between organisations with arts projects, technology providers, and researchers. It is a partnership between Arts Council England (www.artscouncil.org.uk), Arts and Humanities Research Council (www.ahrc.ac.uk) and Nesta (www.nesta.org.uk).
We want to see projects that use digital technology to enhance audience reach and/or develop new business models for the arts sector. With a dedicated researcher or research team as part of the three-way collaboration, learning from the project can be captured and disseminated to the wider arts sector.
Every project needs to identify a particular question or problem that can be tested. Importantly this question needs to generate knowledge for other arts organisations that they can apply to their own digital strategies.
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