Audience1st is a zero-installation, zero-maintenance, all-in-one system for ticketing, subscriptions, development, and backoffice functions, designed expressly for the needs, budgets and constraints of small to medium community theaters.

Audience1st is more than a ticketing system—it’s a way to help build the “community” around a community theater. According to Theatre Communications Group’s TheatreFacts 2008, most small nonprofit theaters rely on donations for up to half of their operating budget. That means that selling a ticket to a customer is just the beginning of your relationship with that customer—you need to turn discount buyers into full-price buyers, then into repeat buyers, then into subscribers, and ultimately into donors and supporters. Yet most low-cost third-party ticketing solutions stop at just that—ticket sales—with no mechanisms to help you manage this lifecycle, in which ticket-buying is just the first step.

How is Audience1st different? Audience1st integrates your own ticket sales, third-party ticket sales (such as Tix Bay Area ½ price tickets and Goldstar Events™), box office reports, calendar, up-to-the-minute ticket availability information (which can be easily displayed on your own web site), attendance statistics, donor management and followup, online donations, and support for email marketing campaigns, all in one Web-based system. There’s no software to install or maintain—everything works from your Web browser.  This keeps our costs low, and yours too.

Who can benefit? Audience1st was developed specifically for the needs of nonprofit community performing-arts organizations, with extensive functions for donor tracking and email campaigns integrated with ticket sales and box office operations, integration with social networking such as Facebook, streamlined user interfaces that are easy for your volunteers to learn (the box office agent’s user interface closely follows the patron user interface, so your patrons can easily become volunteer box office agents), and a high degree of automation around ticket sales, phone-based information and sales, reporting/bookkeeping, and box office management, to minimize human resources needed on your end.

I already have a ticketing solution—why would I need Audience1st? If all you do is sell tickets, you’re probably set; we’re not trying to compete on price with large-scale ticket marketing.  But if you care about tracking your donors, building up a subscriber base, and connecting all of your patron-related functions together, you should ask what support your existing ticketing solution offers.  Even if you continue to use your existing solutions for ticketing, Audience1st can import that information and tie it to your patron-building activities.

• Learn more about Audience1st™ features.

• Read about Audience1st™ pricing.