Arts People vs. Splash Event Marketing Platform

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

When we first started using Splash Event Marketing Platform, the platform showed great promise and worked well for our team’s needs. However, over the past year, we’ve encountered issue after issue—many of which are described by support as problems “no one else has ever experienced.” Unfortunately, this has happened frequently, making it difficult to trust the platform for consistent execution.

• 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

• Their support team is very friendly and helpful. They get back to me within a couple of hours and have lots of resources to help remotely.
• I like being able to check people in on mobile.
• Their templates make it easy to design something cool. I'm not a trained designer, but using Splash templates lets me create cool invitations that look very well designed.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• When designing a landing page for an event, the functionality of the layout page is quite finicky. I would love to see the ability to add features to certain text boxes become more fluid.
• The formatting across the layout page is not always consistent, specifically text sizing.
• I had an issue with an account, and the support team took an extremely long time (2+ months) to produce a remedy for the issue I was experiencing.

Incentivized

Because easy to interface and easy to manage Splash platform and individual event platform and easy to integrate with third party software such as Adobe Marketo and others softwares. Easy to maintain status and easy to relate with Salesforce campaign through Marketo . Useful in lead capturing and generation and so on we can enable business through splash.

Incentivized

The platform works, and it is a good system. I think there is always room for improvement. and I would like to see them up their client resolutions when it comes to problems with using the system. and see them take a more aggressive approach to addressing the clients changing needs

Incentivized

We love working with our account manager and priority support to answer questions efficiently and speedily. Our account manager works with us on larger and bigger picture initiatives for our instance, where the priority support is always there when you're stuck with a feature or setup, it's been great to share this resource with our global network of hosts internal and external to the company.

• 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 used to use Eventbrite to manage our events before we were switched into using Splash. It was much easier to use, had a consistent usability structure for creating events and getting users to sign up. While it wasn't as customizable in terms of the landing page or email design, it did the job without any issues. We didn't necessarily select to use Splash, but our event coordinators at Hubspot chose the platform for us! If we could go back, we would.

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

• Positive: We've now been able to track whether people who attend our events eventually become donors to our organization, which is HUGE for measuring event ROI and the time horizons for a donation.
• Negative: Can't think of any negative impacts on our business objectives. It solves the problem it is designed for, and continues to improve.

Incentivized