Duke University Box Office

Duke University Box Office Increases Online Ticket Sales with The Patron Edge Online for Reserved Seating

The Duke University Box Office at Duke University serves the ticketing needs of the on campus cultural events and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The museum serves the university and surrounding region with an ambitious schedule of traveling, leading-edge exhibitions and educational programs that foster multidisciplinary learning. Meanwhile, Duke Performances holds over 500 professional performing arts events, theater previews, Chamber Arts Society events, major performances, and student productions each year on campus. The box office annually processes an average of 200,000 tickets for approximately 1,000 events.

The Challenge:

• Support for Duke University Box Office’s previous ticketing system was being discontinued. Additionally, the previous solution was archaic, lacking in both functionality and usability.
• The previous solution was cumbersome and slow. It would take days for changes to be made to pricing or seating charts, for example.
• Patrons were charged both an order fee and ticket fee, with most of the money going to the box office’s outside ticket processing vendor and not to the organization.

The Solution:

• Duke University selected The Patron Edge Online for Reserved Seating because it gave the functionality the organization needed to provide an enhanced user experience internally and to patrons.
• Additionally, The Patron Edge Online for Reserved Seating gives patrons the ability to reserve seat series and process renewals online.
• The user interface for The Patron Edge is much more user-friendly and intuitive enough that new staff and volunteers can quickly learn the system.
• The Patron Edge also gave Duke University Box Office the ability to bring its web functionality in-house.

The Results:

• Increased online ticket sales by 20 percent the first two years using The Patron Edge Online for Reserved Seating.
• Approximately 40 percent of ticket sales are completed online.
• Website updates that would take weeks to make are now done in a matter of minutes quickly and easily by box office staff.
• The box office was able to decrease fees to patrons while keeping the money from fees within the organization.