Using Audience Booking Patterns to inform staffing decisions

Who? Belfast Film Festival, an annual week long festival held annually in late March.

What was the issue?
Historically the festival box office opened in late February and bookings were taken via phone and face to face. The face-to-face box office was traditionally open five days a week between 9.30am and 5.30pm for the four weeks prior to the festival representing an intensive use of staffing. In 2006 online ticket booking was introduced.

The team at the festival felt that the member of staff manning the face-to-face box office could be more effective based in the office and considered re-organising the opening in 2007 until the week before the festival opened.

The Solution?
Belfast Film Festival asked Audiences NI to create an online survey after the 2006 Festival which included questions on ticket purchasing preferences. They also requested an analysis of ticket purchase trends in 2006 to find out the percentages of advance sales that were conducted online or through the box office. This would help to inform staffing decisions for the 2007 festival.

What was the result?
The results of the survey for 2006 showed that 69% of respondents preferred to book their tickets online, and the analysis showed that 58% of ticket revenue in 2006 was taken online. This information gave the festival team the confidence to re-organise the opening of the face to face box office to a week before the festival, thereby making more efficient use of staff resources.

Having implemented their plan for the 2007 festival, ticket revenue overall actually rose by 50%, with 58% of ticket revenue generated online during the festival – making online the most popular means of buying tickets each year since it was introduced as an option.

Feed-back
“We asked Audiences NI to survey our customers about online ticket sales, providing us with the information we needed to back up what was a difficult decision. We benefited greatly from having an extra member of staff in the office in the run up to Festival.” (Anne-Marie Murphy, Marketing Manager, Belfast Film Festival)