Can you imagine anyone touching a paper ticket ever again? It seems strange to consider — but after COVID-19, selling and redeeming tickets digitally may be the new normal.
Romy Glazer: Hey everyone! Thanks for coming to the webinar this morning! It is 11 o’clock Eastern, a little bit earlier on the west coast. I wanted to take the first minute and just welcome everybody for being here, thanks so much. This is a series that we started doing a few weeks ago and we thought it might be really helpful just to introduce ADs new technology, you know. The companies that we work with, companies that we like, just new things in a really low pressure environment so everyone can kind of get their arms around, you know, what this new world looks like after COVID-19, after everyone kind of leaves quarantine what are sports going to look like.
So we set these up. They’ve been weekly so far, we may spread them out a little bit more because I know, you know, one a week might be a little too much for people. But, it’s been really great and so I wanted to lay out the ground rules as well for this webinar. So we’ve got it looks like a hundred people in here so hi everyone, thanks again for being here. We’re going to run about 30 minutes is our aiming, we know everyone’s got a busy day so we don’t want to take up too much of your time, we respect it. So we’re running 30 minutes and we’ve got everyone in listen-only mode right now, and it’s going to be recorded so we’ll send the video out so you can send your friends or whoever else you need to after. And this listen-only mode, so we have Maura from Hometown Ticketing, as well as myself watching the questions and the chat on the webinar, so as we chat and talk about things if you have a question put them in there. If it’s a quick and easy one we’ll just answer it, but at the end of the presentation we’re also going to open a Q&A, so we’ll ask a few questions live.
So we’ll get rolling from there. Really excited about this one, digital tickets. This is one of those things that when Bob and Maura and I were planning out the webinar, it was like the big question of like, can you ever actually imagine touching a paper ticket ever again after all this compulsive hand-washing, and things we have to do to keep ourselves safe. So you know, we’re really excited about kind of showing off digital ticket. And so we have two people here to start presenting on it. So we’ve got Rick Ehrman, CEO of VNN, and Bob Brickley VP at Hometown Ticketing who will be able to take it from here.
Rick Ehrman: Hi everyone this is Rick. I’ll keep it brief, we’ve found that these sessions are most productive if we get the Q&A quicker, and I want to off to Bob, you know the handle here so he can take everyone through kind of the user experience and the functionality. As Romy mentioned, we like to do these for a bunch of reasons. We like to present new tools, new product, most importantly partnerships. The previous webinars that we’ve conducted, the Q&A has really, you know, revolved at least towards me around how much diligence did we do, and why did we choose Hometown Ticketing or whoever we’re talking about as a partner. In this particular case I want to mention a few things. So fur us everything we do, we do to make the lives of ADs easier. So when we looked at hometown ticketing, you know ease of use, immediate access to funds, and most importantly was compliance and reporting. So I know Bob’s going to talk a little bit about each one of those things, I looked at the participation list and I know most of you are VNN customers, and if you’re not, we hope you consider becoming one.
And as you can see from the slide that we pulled up, we really pride ourselves on being able to kind of integrate with all the players that are out there. So if you participated in any of these earlier in the year, you know, that we also as we look at each one of the sub verticals within the world or the ecosystem that we play in, we do build a my partner analysis on kind of everything that we look at and decided in this case that Hometown Ticketing is the right player to partner with. In some case we’ll build technology, in some cases we’ll buy companies like we did with Rally Around Us on the fundraising side, but this one really became a no-brainer for us. And we listened very closely through qualitative and quantitative kind of research. What athletic directors, coaches, parents, families, were looking for and as we all know the world is changing as we speak. We believe that now is the time more than ever to make sure we’re communication effectively the value proposition of digital ticketing. So I’ll hand it over after saying another thing. In a previous life of mine before VNN in July, I was actually involved in analyzing this entire industry, not just in the high school sports space but was involved in NBC Sports when we made an investment in Fandango on the movie side. So knew kind of what to look for, what to evaluate. We’re a big fan of the management team at Hometown Ticketing and their culture and believe that they think the same way about some of the challenges that you all face on a daily bases, the same way that we do. So with that said, I’ll hand it over to Bob, and just feel free to punch questions or hold them to the end and we’re happy to answer anything that you want to get out there.
Bob Brickley: Cool thank you Rick, thank you Romy as well I appreciate it. Yeah we’re excited to be partners with VNN, and we are excited to kind of share who we are and what we do with everyone on the call so thank you for your time today. And I appreciate the introduction. You know when you think about digital ticketing, you know, it’s kind of one of those things where, you know it’s been around for everyone for a while. You know, yeah the idea of movies you mentioned Fandango, it is for concerts and pro sports events, you know where you buy at home, you know the tickets delivered to you in an email, you show up, you show your phone or maybe you choose to print your ticket and you gain access to the event.
Well you know as we look forward, and we’re working with ADs right now to kind of help plan for the fall and what you know, what differences they may need in this fall season that’s approaching us, and there’s a lot of unknown and we understand that, and we’re trying to work through you know, how can, how can we best support an AD as they’re preparing, you know, further for the fall season. And we look at those type of you know, the environment that our parents and fans are in right now you know, and they’re used to that, that seeing no contact experience right, the less transactions the better, those type of things. And we feel that we have the kind of tools that can support what that new normal is going to look like in the fall season, and we’ve been doing it for a while. And we’d like to, you know, kind of share it with you.
Everybody here, what we do and we do it first off would love to kind of you know talk about kind of who we are. You know we are the fastest growing digital ticketing provider servicing schools you know. We both signed up of 550 schools since June. Anyway, first you know so we’ve had a very busy first quarter of the year, and we’re continuing to grow at, you know rapid rates right now as we have schools that are making decisions and realizing that, you know, the time is now, you know. And we need to bring this to our fans whether it’s in the form of a season pass, whether it’s in the form of you know, trying to handle different event and in their high school or middle school, or we you know, we’re doing all kinds of different events throughout the K-12 district, so we are kind of a complete software company where we have, we have our entire DEV team on staff. You know our founders, Nate and Wes, have built our product from the ground up, you know we, it’s one where you know we sat down and they sat down with different school districts whether it be an AD, whether it be an athletic director, whether it be a treasurer and CFO, a theater director, and kind of ask the question you know, what would you like your digital ticketing product to look like.
How would you like it to function, what features and benefits do you want, and then they essentially built that around the needs of local districts and kind of work with them in kind of creating a software platform that fits everyone’s needs and delivered a couple key features. And we’ll talk about those here in a couple minutes, but you know our goal is we want to bring that professional level and fully automated ticketing solution down to the high school and middle school, you know. And you have that experience at the movie theaters where you’ve selected your seat, you have that experience going to a concert or going to a professional sporting event, and we want to provide that same level of quality, and you know that fans are used to when they’re going to an event. We want to bring that to the high school space and we’ve successfully done that in over the last four years. So it’s kind of an exciting time for use as you can see on the screen here, you we’ve, we have a large amount of partners that we work with that we pride ourselves in. Whether it be a state organization or, you know, some local partners obviously like VNN, some Texas partners like Dave Campbell’s Texas football, and some marketing partners we have to kind of bring added value. And our Strike partnership which obviously we’ll talk about a little bit kind of how we, you know, pride ourselves in not touching school funds. And that’s something we’ll spend a little time on in a little bit, but feel free if you have questions obviously Romy mentioned, don’t hesitate to put those in the chat you know. I’m excited to kind of hear what you guys are thinking about, is your planning for the fall. And, let you know what unknowns you’re trying to prepare for, or what you’re trying to work with your administration on to find answers, you know to things that you haven’t experienced before.
And maybe we can bring insight on how we’ve helped some schools already get to that level. So a couple differences you know we pride ourselves on providing that I mentioned, professional level service. But you know it’s we customized every single aspect of our, whether it be our box office, our tickets, our seat maps, our passes, the website, the purchase experience, the scanning app, everything is completely custom and branded to your school. And in which we want to give your, not only your fans, but your gate workers and your staff the experience of, you know, I’m working with a professional level service here, I’m looking at the highest quality product there is. We want to bring that to them, and we do it through our software and our DEV team kind of delivers that for us. Obviously we’re looking, you know, for an easy ticket buying experience so we’ll talk about that in a second where, we embed everything our software, directly onto your school website. We interfere VNN, we integrate on the back end if you’re not a VNN school you know, we embed on the district’s website or the high school athletic page. We want to give that fan the experience that they’re used to maybe with an Amazon purchase or a Target purchase, where they’re not directed all over the place. They’re buying it on the website that they’re in, and when they finish their transaction, they’re still in your school website. So it can continue to, you know, find other events or, you know, research other things that they’re looking for, for their students. So there’s a lot of different things that we do.
I mentioned immediate funds available. We have a partnership with Stripe, I have a couple different options here but you know our most valuable option to schools is you know, we don’t want to hold your funds, we don’t want to touch. Just your ticket revenue, we deliver that to you, you know at the time of transaction. And our, with our Strike partnership, so whether you’re selling season passes, now you’re doing a season ticket renewal, and maybe May or June for the fall you have those funds available to you immediately. You’re no longer waiting for a post event check to arrive or anything, you know that after the event we pride ourselves in not having any contact with school funds, and we don’t want to, you know, our goal is to have that delivered directly to you at time of purchase. And we talk about our Strike partnership a little bit. Yeah I mentioned the no contacts ticket sales, and ticket redemption, that’s something that we’ve been you know, providing for several years now through our, our quick scanning as well as you know, the EM guide on the website so fans are able to no long have to come into your school building during a certain time period, you know, where there’s two to four, to buy tickets for a Friday or whatever it might be.
You know we provide that for them, and the combine whatever they want. You know we have a historical stat that, you know, about 40% of all fans will buy tickets just after 9 p.m. because that’s just when it’s convenient for that, and we wouldn’t want you to have, you know, your ticket sales office open to meet the needs of your fans. So you can decide your website availability. So that type of thing we’ll bet into that. We have obviously the, we pride ourselves on being the most financial transparent ticketing company in the industry. We have all kinds of you know, event specific, and even fan specific reporting tools that allow you to, you know, reach the needs of your, of your school and especially your business offices you’ve got to go back on, on your events and your revenue per event.
I’m going to get into our custom seat maps here in a minute, and we also provide you a dedicated account manager, but we also have a completely open and back-end, where if you’d like to have, you know, full access to make trick changes to events or to add your own or to, you know, whatever you’d like to do, you have full access. We don’t limit you in any way, we’re happy to train you and let you completely run your own box office or happy to work with you along the way as you get. So wanted to kind of start off and kind of jump in and give you a quick example of, you know, kind of a hot item for use right now, and let you kind of see our website and then we’re going to start off with an example here. And what you’re looking at is a live website, it’s an Xavier High School in Cincinnati Ohio, we are directly on their school website.
So as you can see, I can click around, and you , maneuver around the school website, but you have our software embed essentially a white label ticketing software, so we, fan clicks on this site, if they click on, you know, the school, created a nice little tickets tab here, and takes us directly to this page. You know your fans or parents have that experience, or the visual of, you know, I’m buying this, you know, almost a visual of course pass the bomb, are all supports passed directly from, you know, to high school, you know, and when they click this button to get passes you know, they’re essentially staying on the page, and they’re not being redirected to, you know, additional sites or taken off the page. Obviously you know this school has some sponsors that they think, they don’t want to drive traffic away from their sponsors, they like to keep, you know keep their fans there so. We have a digital pass and a hard pass now, as you can see up here on the screen. The digital pass is something that’s delivered to the phone, you know, it’s available to be saved in your Apple Wallet, it’s able to be, we have a very awesome share text feature where we can actually share this via text or by email to, you know, to another fan or family member, that type of thing. But we also offer a hardback for if that fan would like that commemorative pass or commemorative ticket for the season when they maybe, it’s your senior citizens that would prefer it, just have you know, the pass in their wallet that has their name on it.
And we produced those and we deliver this to you as well, so there’s a lot of different options we have, so you know on the buying option here if I choose to buy a ticket, I go through my checkout process again, you’ll see I’m staying right on this page, and I’m able to say, you know, essentially buy my ticket, fill in my information. We do have customized, you know, kind of the order form, so if we need to collection additional information from you, we can, but you have that great experience of buying directly on the school page. So no better way to then just show you our software and what the user experience is and to have it essentially directly on, you know, a school website so you can actually see the ticket.
So I’m going to show you a couple other different examples here. So you get an idea of things that we can do, I’m going to jump over here right now to Lake High School, it’s a high school here also in Ohio, in the Northeast Ohio area, and you can see this to be an insight, so we’re directly on the VNN page through our integration. We have a nice little tickets button already created up here at the top, we have the ability to, you know they’ve obviously embedded a nice video for kind of a season ticket renewal to help share their name with their parents, kind of a new process. There’s a lot of things we can help you with, but obviously we have athletic passes, we have season ticket renewal, and we’ll jump up into these here to you know, give you an idea what these look like. Obviously we have you know, a season ticket, or no I mentioned our seat maps earlier. So you have the ability tto put any type of information you need in. We want to click, we want to find our seats we pride ourselves in, you know, a custom integration seat map. So we have these different things here, so we our graphics team, phenomenal team, that literally will get down to the detail whether it’s the shading of grass with it’s, you know, certain areas of your stadium, we want the logo on the field, that type of thing, we want you to have your fans to have that external experience you know, obviously here is an interactive map. It’s a fully interactive, if I want to, you know, get into a seat now, these are not open to the public right now, they’re going through a renewal period where we actually off them up for renewal first.
We do have a code system which, as you can see up here, which allows your fans that you may have a seat location already assigned to them from previous years, or previous programs we provide them with a unique pass code, and you know they’re allowed to then click in a purchase their ticket. So the idea here is you know we want to not only provide you with all the features and benefits that pro-level service, but we’re doing it at your stadium as we design your stadium map. So there’s a lot of different things that we can do, and we want to provide that with you. I’m just goin to take you through a couple other examples, you know.
Here’s a whole bunch of different passes, whether it be, you know, a student pass, a senior pass, an adult pass, family pass, those type of things, all available. We can work with you on different pricing options, yeah we work with, you know, hundreds of schools across the U.S., so we can give you the ideas. A lot of ADs asked me, you know, hey what do you think about our pass pricing, you know, can you give us an idea, are we in the right ballpark. And we try to compare some like sized schools and that type of thing, with you to help you. It’s new information to give you a quick example of what the pass does look like. Jump back over here, a couple different examples as you can see. We have completely customized again logos, colors, you know, a student pass, family pass, we can, you know, get into football, reserve seat, has sections, rows, and seat numbers. We can separate depending on what type of passes you offer. You know, we can work with you on meeting those parameters. So there’s yeah, you can come to us and say hey, this is what we’ve been doing and we’ll kind of design the pass, digital pass program to work for you.
As you can see there’s ability to quick, easy, transfer, easy way into your Apple wallet. You can always save it, that type of thing. So we wanted to kind of move on here, give you a couple other quick examples of some other K12 events. Obviously you can see basketball we do a lot with reserved seats, for theater, for dances, that type of thing you know so there’s a lot of different events that you can have access to.
We also provide, on purchase, a digital ticket directly to that fan. So there is ad space, so we’ve talked a lot of ADs that are looking, you known for the fall they’re trying to help their local businesses right now in their community that, you know, may be struggling. Local restaurants, things like that, that are struggling, and these are free ad spaces. You know, you’re more than welcome to sell them, we don’t take any of the revenue, other that you’re welcome to use it to kind of help promote those local businesses in your town. There’s three add spaces on here if you choose not to use them, they’ll just be blank, but if you’d like to use them, they are available. Here’s a great example of the VNN integration, where right on their skin their tickets page, we have a full schedule. You have directions to the event, and you have the nice little buy ticket button directly on, you know directly on the schedule. So just going to give you an idea. There’s a whole bunch of different ways we can kind of work with you on that. I did mention we do give you that full access to the back end right, we have the ability to customize multiple user levels whether it’s, you know, a department admin, whether it’s a box office admin, whether it’s a gate worker, whether it’s just a volunteer that’s going to be there for one event. And you’d like to essentially customize that level. We have full reporting capabilities you do have, and I’ll just show you quickly here at the backend of a box office, you do have the ability.
Here’s a youth camp, and so you do have the ability to, if you’d like, to access, maybe change a start time, or I stopped, if you wanted, you know, you take your pre-sale, you want to turn it off at noon and input your gate, take your price starting at, you know one. There’s a lot of different things we can do for you. You have full access to reporting and guest lists, you can accept it, you can essentially process orders on the backside, you can send out comp tickets to a faculty, staff, visiting admin, that type of thing. There’s a lot of different ways that you can use the back, the backend of our box office too. Quickly and easily, if I wanted to send a comp ticket off to a visiting superintendent or a visiting ad I could select seats and have them sent off very quickly and easily so we give you a full access to everything in our system. We don’t hold anything back, we don’t say hey, you know, you have to call us to make that change, you know we want you to, if you’re interested in taking control of managing your backend, we’re absolutely going to give you full reins.
But, we also have that level of account management support to handle those things for you if you’d like. A transition real quick, a couple of, our scanning has been extremely popular. These are some event we did in kind of late February, early March, wanted to give you an idea on. I’m just going to play this real quick here while I talk, the idea behind this is you know, we have you know, no contacts scanning. So we’re not, there’s no need to, you know, touch a fan’s phone. There’s no need to, as you can see, here, fans are walking up, they show their phone, it scans quickly and easily. Whether they chose to print their ticket, whether they show on their phone, we’re actually going to capture that scan. And you can see this worker here, we don’t need to touch people’s phones, we don’t need to do anything else. So nice quick and easy here.
Wanted to also, this was our forum, NOAA, just a regional event over here in Dayton so very similar. They wanted to use a tablet they had to scan, absolutely no problem, we set up somebody to run their line. The idea is they know fans can simply scan their ticket, and your gate attendant can see that green check for good, and you know that that is a valid ticket. We also have a duplicate ticket feature, which is great for your gate workers. It pops up blue, and it lets them know that hey, you know, this ticket has been scanned at, maybe, 6:04 p.m. at gate 2. You know, so the idea behind it is we’re giving your gate workers exactly the same information too, you know, to say I’m sorry the other students trying to, you know, manipulate a ticket and use their friends, that type of thing. Or it’s a valid mistake and they just have the wrong ticket open. So a lot of different things that we can do to help your gates.
Come fall you know, whether you know your gate workers, you know that number one thing that’s on their mind right now after this, it’s going to be hey, I don’t want to have to interact. I don’t want to have to take things from fans as they walk up, you know. So we’re trying to offer our tools and solutions to kind of help solve that problem and give you a nice easy, you know, solution to that.
We also have a full point-of-sale system. So if you are a larger stadium, and you’d like to, you know, have that, you know full cash reconciliation where you have record of all cash transactions, you accept credit card at gate, you know that type of thing, we have that full system you know. We can help set that up if that’s something you’re interested in.
Wanting to move on to our pricing levels here, you know, essentially we have, we’re a no charge service. So there are no costs to the school, whether you’re on our Pro Plan, or our Pro Plus model, we do have a dollar convenience to be charged on every ticket to the fan. If you choose our Pro model, it is the model that you receive a payment kind of in ten business days, our Pro Plus model is the one I spoke about the most. With our strike partnership, immediate fund availability, I mean it is kind of the only way to handle school funds you know, in this industry, and this time, and that’s something we pride ourselves on having that ability to, you know, get you your funds immediately on purchase, and no long er having to wait for that. But so you’ll want it to, obviously football’s right around the corner and we’re working with schools right now to plan for fall and to kind of help come up with the ideas that you could take to your district office, your superintendent, as you know they’re going to be tasking with, you know, and the athletic department, saying hey, find new ways to do things, find better way, improve ways, and we know that you know we can help you.
And we can kind of solve that, that event management issue for you for the fall. So happy to kind of open it up to questions, and if we need to kind of go over it again I’m happy to answer whatever you have.
RG: Sweet! Thanks Bob! Great stuff. So I’m going to hop in here to the question menu, we got a lot that came in. So let’s go with the first one that I saw. Once a ticket is scanned, does it go away for the game and just like a question, you know, how do you make sure that someone’s not reusing it to get in over and over again?
BB: Yeah! So, we said our tickets for athletic event essentially, it is a one scan per event. Right, one entry, we have that duplicate ticket feature on our scanning app which allows, you know, it does recognize if a ticket has bee or is attempted to be scanned a second or even third time. It does give the gate worker that original scanned time, but if it was scanned for the first time you know, we also have an entry exit feature most commonly used for school dances, where, you know, basically you’re going to have that students scan out as they leave, that way you have the data of yeah, they walked in you know, at 8:00 p.m., and they left our building at 11:02, you know, that type of thing.
So, most commonly, for athletic events, it’s a single scanner event and our passes do work the same way as well, where it’s essentially one scan for event, it’s not per day, so you could have that, you know, volleyball game in the morning, soccer game in the afternoon, and football game at night, and they’re using that pass, you know. They scan one entry per event.
RG: Perfect. A question about pricing, so one person was asking if the price for an all sports pass could be adjusted as the school year goes on. Like, for instance, lowering the price after fall sports, after winter sports, etc, how might you handle that.
BB: Yeah absolutely, great question. You know, the idea behind, we recommend passes to be sold throughout the year. You know it’s one of those things where you know, you’re maybe it’s a beginning of the year, it’s a $200 all season, you know, all year pass, and then it’s a quick adjustment in the back end of our system as I mentioned, in your box office, to change that pricing you can quickly do that yourself. And you know it’s one of those things where just by simply clicking in here, I’m going to hump back here to my event, but you know the idea here is if I want to, I can click in as you can see my price here is $50, I could easily make a quick change to that price, save it, and it’s live for all fans to see. I can even set a start and end time on that price too if I want, to have multiple price levels.
RG: Okay! Alright next one. Is the dollar fee per ticket or per transaction?
BB: It is $1 per ticket, that’s kind of our base model in terms of whether it’s, you know, fan is buying one or two or whatever, so it’s $1 per ticket kind of since we are a no charge service, that it’s kind of the easiest model. And we’ve done a lot of research on that, the tipping point for a fan is right at a dollar you know. It’s kind of what they’re comfortable with, and what the extent is.
RG: Cool. Is there, is that the same fees for season passes or is there a different pricing structure?
BB: There is a different pricing structure, that’s a great question. We, you know, every single ticket that we sell has a dollar fee on it with the digital pass. There is a two dollar additional charge essentially. What that does is, because that fan, you know, they could attend you know 30, you know 25, 30 different events. And they’re only having that one charge at one transaction, so it is a three dollar total on that, on that pass that allows us to kind of set the parameters, as well as deliver that to them digitally, so that it’s a $3 per, you know, digital pass, if they are interested in that, that hard produce pass, there’s an addition $4 there on that one because we do have to have it produced, and you know created, produced, and printed then shipped to the school. But we do suggest a couple different things when it comes to passes, and we work with every school and kind of, ideas on how to best present this to your fans. But you know, the idea of giving them both options, you saw, they both offered both options, hard and digital, because the digital can be sold all year and the produced ones, the hard pass, there is a timing involved. We obviously have to stop sales of those to get them produced and delivered to you because they’re customized right.
Most of our schools as you know, as you can see on the examples, we’ll take that $3 digital pass or whatever the, you know, whatever they’re adding to it, and they will let in to the price of the pass. There’s a school of thought, you know the more you want to drive behavior the more you have to give them be it, you know, an option that works for them. So you give them that $150 flat fee price that they’re offering, you know there is no question about whether I’m going to buy it online, it’s just I’m going to buy it online, versus if you were to pass that fee on to the fan, now they have the option of, hey, you know what maybe I’ll drive on up and come into the athletic office and try to avoid paying that three dollars, you know. So, and that’s not the behavior that you’re trying to, you’re trying to reduce that interaction. And people coming into your school, so by ruling that in absorbing that fee is essentially a way to drive the behavior that you’re looking for.
RG: Perfect. So there was a question that came in about the bike ticket links on the schedule page. I think that was on Lake or Everman High School, one of those tab you had up. Is that something that is available, you know for every school, like on schedule pages, or how does that work? Just VNN?
BB: Yes so that buy tickets button that you saw there on the Everman page, and let me pull it up here, that is currently only available through our VNN partnership of being an integration. The, you know, the fact that we’re bringing you that ticket right to the schedule page, and parking, the way our integration works is you know, your scheduler obviously talks to the VNN page, and we talked to the VNN page, so we connect, you know, essentially to your scheduler, you know so the idea behind that is, if you’d like this type of look that, you know, that is available only on the VNN website. The other schools have, you know just more of a general ticket page, and it’s by event.
RG: Cool. Great. A question about a district that no longer charges for home athletic contests, do we have any resources for districts that no longer charge if they’re using say, the gated entry points for just security scan location. Like how might that work?
BB: So there’s a lot we can do there to help, you know, even if you’re not charging we do recommend providing your fans with a digital pass or even offer the ability of a hard pass. So that’s something the district is interested in, but by offering a digital pass, you now have the ability to know who was attending your events, and you also have the ability of capacity information if you would like to, you know, kind of reach, reach out to them post event. Maybe it’s a thank you for coming by email, when you have, when you offer those passes to your fans, you now have the ability to improve communication with those that attend it. Know who has attended, and also you know, give the idea of you’re still checking in. With our scanning feature, just, you know, essentially you know, our scanner works up to ten feet away, so if you do need to create that full barrier from your ticket scanner to your family walking in, you know we can. Our scanner is that fast and that powerful, so that we can essentially meet the needs of all social, you know distance when it comes to that type of interaction. But I would definitely, even though you’re free, you want that data of who’s attending and maybe you can even remarket them, you know, “Hey thanks for coming to our soccer game, you know, did you know there’s a school drama performance, you know, on, you know, we’re performing Shrek on Thursday, we’d love to have you attend that type of thing. So there’s a lot you can do just by having the data of who’s attending your events.
RG: Love that. Okay so we’ll do three more. There’s a lot coming in I know we’re getting a little bit over time. One request, could we go back to the pricing. That slide when I was trying to figure out what Alex’s email was. So if could, there seems, that would be great to pull up. Looks great, okay we’ll do three more. What is the start-up costs for the scanning equipment, this person says hey we’re a small school but we have up to four gates operating on a given night, so they’re trying to figure out what kind of the overlay or the cost for equipment.
BB: Sure! You know we work with schools all sizes, so we’re you know, only like able to help you there. Most gate workers would actually prefer to use their own phone, and when it comes to scanning you can put our scanning app on any device. You know, Apple, Android, that essentially allows you to download an app and has a camera right, we can turn any of those. Your volunteer’s, your gate worker’s devices into scanners right, so at that point you’re not having to buy anything. We’ve designed our app so it pulls little to no data whatsoever off of a person’s phone. Because, the first question they’re going to say is, I don’t want to use my data, right. Well it actually takes over two million scans to pull a gig of data off someone’s phone, and we would be more than happy to have that problem on a daily basis, but we don’t, you know, so it’s not going to pull any data. if you have, you know, you can see here in the picture on the right, the school had extra iPads that weren’t being used during the event. Right, extra tablets of any type you can use those too, you know so, most commonly there isn’t any purchase involved to handle your scanning. There’s several different ways we can help you with the, we do, we’re happy to do a site survey if, you know, if you’re concerned about “Hey, we’re kind of a remote location and we’re not sure that you know, we’re going to have great connectivity” that type of thing, you know.
We have a full operations team that, you know, is happy to kind of work with you on those type of solutions and, and kind of create a plan for you and say hey, yeah this is what we recommend. Hey, here’s your, here’s where your connectivity is great. Even if it’s just a confirmation of, you know, what you guys have. Everything you need, you know, kind of help get you ready for the ball.
RG: Great okay perfect. So there was another question on internet access, I think we covered that. Also a question on comp passes, like are people able to send complimentary passes?
BB: Absolutely yeah, we understand comps are a part of athletics, right, and it’s a, you know, I kind of mentioned, there’s a couple different ways to deliver that right. The idea of, you can jump into any event. So if I wanted to do, you know, a youth camp here. I want to send out a free… You’re going to have a sponsor to booster parent, and I’d like to send them, you know, essentially a free camp invite for their son or daughter. I simply, I can can click create order on the backend, in that order I would fill out their information and, you know, choose comic box office, and essentially, you know, offer them, you know kind of that free registration, that free ticket to the event.
RG: Great. Let’s see here. So there was a question about sharing passes. So let’s just say someone is purchasing a digital All Seasons family pass, like how would they send that around to their kids, your family, is there a limit to the number. Like can you set limits for sharing a pass or not.
BB: So there are no limits for sharing. It essentially, it’s still going to be a one-time scan per event, right. So you know, a great example here, your parent buys, you know three passes right. You know husband, wife, and student, that you know, all three passes will be delivered to that one during purchase, or in essentially they can hit the transfer button, send on to the husband, one to the student, that type of thing. Or, you know, if it is a situation where you’d like us to deliver those passes separate, and we can help collect the information at the time of transaction and help you deliver those digital passes out to where they need to go. But there is no limit on sharing and transferring, and we try to make it as easy as possible.
RG: Cool. Oh man I see a few more so I figure we’ll take a few more, would rather we go over and answer all the questions. So someone is asking, we have two high schools and two middle schools, are we able to keep money separated for building, how are people able to track the differences?
BB: Yes so there’s a couple different ways we handle that. And it could be even you know, basically by the way, and order is set up right, so we created an event and the first thing that we ask you when you create an event essentially is the fact that we can define what ticket option is, you know, is it a varsity sport you know. It’s cool, clever, fun, you know we can label this high school, middle school, whatever it might be, that type of thing. We can even put the you know department name or even accounting code in there, we also have the ability if it’s something that you’re interested in is you know – because there’s separate box offices we could you know possibly do a separate stripe account for you if that’s something that you’d like to. Truly separate funds on so there’s a couple different ways that you know that can
happen I think.
RG: So question about client arts programs, are you able to use this for drama club, or you know certain club events or team dinners or anything?
BB: Oh absolutely. You know performing arts events, you know, athletics is one of our biggest uses for schools, you know, that whether we’re creating a full stage, whether we’re doing seating around a stage, for a dinner, we do a ton of, you know, Awards banquets we do Hall of Fame inductions, you know, for schools were if you think about it anytime that you’d like to have you know that nice, whether it be a purchase ticket or even just an invitation that you’d like to send out to an event, you know, we can absolutely help with those.
RG: Great. I had a question come in from what in financial information do we need from the school to get set up. Is that, you know like usually do you talk to the controller, or you know is their routing number, like how’s that, how does that work, the connections needed.
BB: So yeah great question. So when we do our Story partnership, that’s essentially, you know, kind of where we you have no ability to touch the school funds or we don’t even have the ability to access account numbers or information so we work with your finance department. Whether it’s the treasurer, business manager whoever might be responsible for your, you know, for your your funds and they actually they create the the Stripe account on their own so they’re the only ones that have access to it, they then connect in our box office, you know, to the actual to your accounts. But you know it’s it’s fully encrypted and we do not have access to routing number or anything like that it’s creating a Stripe account is just, you know, it’s essentially you know maybe three to five minutes of a treasurer’s time to create that account. And essentially they’re telling it where they’d like their, their ticket funds to go so it’s kind of, it’s an easy process once it you know it, it takes seconds to connect. Once it’s connected one time we can use it for as many events as you’d like, so it’s not like an every time thing, it’s kind of, and we we provide an on-boarding process with our accounting where, you know, we obviously we verify the proofs for your website, you know we talk about the website, embed, and we also handle that financial information. So we work with you on that. If you need to get your treasurer involved or CFO to, you know, finalize something, you know, we’re happy to help in that instance, as, well, we are a treasurer’s best friend because we can get them their, your gate revenue well before the game begins. So it’s one of those things where we’re happy to help you if it’s needed.
RG: Okay so we’ll take two more of them. One’s about the hardware necessary at the gate to scan tickets, like what is specifically in that sort of package, like what do people usually use beyond the phone to simply scan it at the gate?
BB: Any phone is great, you know. It’s kind of a great tool. We have some schools that will use iPod Touches, befause maybe they had them in the past, or they’re available because they used to be used in the classroom, now they’re not, so iPod Touches are great. We have some, I have some schools that will buy, you know, refurbished iPhones, or refurbished you know Androids because they’re inexpensive, and they have you know, that’s all the functionality you need, is you have the camera and you have the ability to download the app and you know you’re good there. So but iPads and tablets are great as well, so scanning is, you know, we scanned the, Ohio is a great example. We did over 120 football games in a matter of three weeks for the playoffs and we essentially, it takes under three minutes to teach someone how to scan. It takes longer to actually add the app onto their phone than it does to actually teach them how to scan, I mean it’s one of those things where once you teach someone else, once you know they’re set, they can actually teach others. So it’s not a matter of if we tried to simplify that and provide such a kind of a user-friendly and ease-of-use experience that it works for anybody.
RG: Thanks. Okay so we’ll grab maybe the last question, oh did I hear someone pop in?
RE: Oh this is Rick. I just wanted to mention one thing. I don’t, you know, hopefully everyone reaches out to Alex, you know this is a bit of a shameless plug. But one thing I want to make sure everyone on the phone understands is the real true differentiator with the VNN HTT relationship. So we talked about integrate schedules, integrated backend, there are also things like single sign-on for parents. And, you know, for sports and activities, and it’s really the only integrated platform in the industry. So one of our goals is to not only distribute this technology to our, you know 3,000 high school customers we work with, but also how those of you who aren’t VNN customers understand the value of the integrated package. So I just want to mention it, you know, before we start to lose people.
BB: Yeah and best part is theres no cost to, you know add this on, you know so it’s simply, your VNN rep can turn this on in your back end in seconds, you know, it’s one of those kind of quick easy, we’ve made that simple and easy as well so we’re happy to get everyone up and running quickly.
RG: Okay so it looks like last question for the day, I’ve been screenshotting a few people with some more detailed things so we’ll follow up with you after this, but questions for Bob, like if an event is cancelled, someone bought tickets, like how do refunds work.
BB: Great question. Also again, in your box office, you have the, you know, the full ability to handle a refund if you need to. Or you can simply reach out to your, you know, to your account manager if it’s a refund situation. We have a lot of athletic directors like to use our box office backend because maybe instead oof refunding that person, maybe you send them a ticket to a future event, or maybe you use our custom codes to offer them, hey you know what, sorry you couldn’t make it you know, here’s eight dollars. Basically in a code that you can apply to a future event. A lot of different things we can do to help in that situation. I know a lot of schools kind of have a no refund policy, and we, you know, we obviously adapt the policy of each school we work with because it’s a complete custom situation. But if there is a situation that you need to offer a refund for, it’s as easy as a click. So it’s not anything that you need to worry about, we can definitely help with that.
RG: Okay one more. I can’t stop, I think it’s a really good one. So the $100 digital pass let’s say someone sells $100 for one, what dollar amount goes back to the school on like a hundred dollar digital pass if they’re selling those.
BB: So sure. There would be a three dollar fee on top of that, you know, for the convenience fee if you chose in a 2.9% credit card process. And so if you chose to roll that in, yeah you probably, the school of that hundred dollars would get, you know, $96 and change or whatever might be. If they chose the path that fee on to the fan, they would get their full $100, you know, so usually the only situations where a fee is kind of absorbed is a youth camp, you know, again, a place where you want everyone to buy online, a pass again, a place where you want everyone to buy online. You don’t want to have that cash option or a season ticket renewal again, you’re trying to drive the behavior of getting them to renew online, typically your game tickets you know, a $7, $8, $10, or whatever your game tickets might be. You know, it’s the idea you get full ticket value and you’re passing that convenience fee on to the fan, because it is their choice, you know. It’s something that we do have some schools that choose to go completely cashless, and they actually did that a little over a year ago, so you know, they would absorb it that way. Again, they’re trying to change the behavior of their fans, but you know, get full ticket price as long as you go pass that fee on the fan.
RG: Perfect, great. So, I know we have a few more questions that are up here, so I’ve been screen shotting a few of them so we can follow up proactively after this webinar. In the meantime Bob if you wouldn’t mind pulling up slide 13 again real quick for us. If you have any questions or you’re interested, you want to set up, you know, more of a private sort of demo and ask your questions firsthand, whether it’s Bob or Maura, or you know, your VNN rep or whoever it is. Email alex@vnnsports.net, and he’ll provide kind of the information to get you to the right people or, Tim or someone else. And I just wanted to say you know, thank you everyone for spending the time with us this morning, super fun, we’ll continue doing a few more of these over the next coming weeks. Hope every is staying health and appreciate you give us a little bit of your time. Thanks Bob, Maura, Rick, everybody, and we’ll catch you next time.