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While a number of sites, including Artsopolis.com itself, offer discount ticketing services, we all use various third-party vendors. We did look into developing our own ticketing solution a few years ago, but given the vast number of service providers it didn’t make sense for us to enter that market.

The two approaches currently operating in the Artsopolis Network are:

1. Direct ticket sales where the Network member manages an actual inventory of tickets to sell on the organizations’ behalf. The customer purchases the tickets directly from the Network member’s ticketing website. The Network member’s Artsopolis site is used as a gateway or portal to the ticketing website.
2. Referral or “pass thru” offer promotion where the Network member simply passes along the discount information either on the website or via a weekly email newsletter. The customer contacts the cultural organization directly to purchase their tickets and receive the discount.

Option 1 is a very high maintenance approach and you would really need a high volume of ticket sales to make it worth doing.

Option 2 is a much easier approach to manage. Rather than manage an actual ticketing inventory and providing a high level of customer service, you’re simply gathering the discount info from your cultural orgs and passing that info along to your email subscribers or website visitors.

The ticketing system we use locally is InTicketing (http://www.inticketing.com/)

Another popular system that some communities are using is Tessitura (http://www.tessituranetwork.com). They offer a very robust system for managing a community box office. It’s also quite likely that one or more of your large budget orgs already use this system since it also includes a CRM, Fundraising/Membership module, and marketing tools.