Streamlining registration for discount ticket schemes

Here at Action Links HQ, we love a bargain - who doesn’t! Despite rising funding challenges across the sector and - in places - inflated ticket prices as a reaction to combat this, it’s reassuring to see that many organisations are still committed to offering significantly discounted tickets to young people. Providing accessible routes into theatre has long been a critical part of audience development plans for many venues, and there are lots of generous discounted ticket schemes that are free and open to join (often made possible by corporate support partnerships with major brands). 

However in order to overcome some of the barriers for first time attendance amongst youngsters, it’s critical that the process for accessing and utilising these discounts is simple, quick and intuitive (especially when targeting the digital natives of Gen Z who “turn to the internet when looking for any kind of information” - McKinsey & Co, 2024). So how can we provide intuitive registration to discount schemes that is quick and simple for both users and staff?

Two leading performing arts venues, the Royal Shakespeare Company (also known as the RSC) in Stratford and Sadler’s Wells in London, worked with Action Links to find a smoother, simpler way to facilitate their young people’s discount ticket schemes; RSC TikTok tickets (offering £10 tickets for 14-25 year olds, and full time students) and Sadler’s Wells Barclays Dance Pass(offering £10 tickets for 16-30 year olds).

The challenge

To access ringfenced discounted tickets targeted at a specific group, users typically need to ‘sign up’ or register to a venue’s discount scheme. Usually this involves providing a few details about themselves; their email address to enable future marketing communications; and perhaps even proof of certain validation criteria (e.g. age). This information is then used to create the user within a CRM system, with a tag or identifier against them that unlocks access to the discounted ticket prices or other related benefits. 

However depending on the tools used to capture the registration, sometimes this data transfer to the CRM system involves multiple manual steps (especially if sign up is via a paper form). Inevitably this takes time for staff teams and leaves the user waiting in a processing loop before they can actually gain access to discounted tickets. And of course, time is of the essence when a show is selling out and there’s a limited capacity of discount tickets being offered.

Both Sadler’s Wells and the RSC were experiencing challenges with administering their discount schemes and were looking for solutions that XXXX. Sadler’s Wells were using a form widget on their website to collect name, email address, month/year of birth, mobile number and optionally provide their postcode. However the form widget didn’t validate month/year of birth on entry, allowing users to submit the sign up form even if they were an ineligible age. XXX.  The RSC were…

The solution

For the Sadler’s Wells Barclays Dance Pass registration, the team knew that they wanted to continue collecting the same customer information as their previous sign up form (which was already stripped down to the bare minimum data required). So the new Action Links registration page replicates similar form fields on the front-end, but uses Action Links’ validation criteria functionality to check and prevent a user from signing up if the date of birth entered is ineligible - so no more confusing successful sign up confirmation messages.

This is coupled with behind the scenes logic to automatically write the registration back to the relevant places in Tessitura. This involves updating an existing constituent customer record or creating a new one; populating their address; adding an attribute to store their date of birth; and finally adding a ‘Barclays Dance Pass’ Constituency with an expiry date that will nullify the users benefits once they are over 30. This removes previous manual steps… with the integration running instantly on submission. This means users will immediately be able to login to their TNEW customer account and view and book discounted tickets because their constituent record in Tessitura, will now shift their mode of sale to unlock access to a Barclays Dance Pass £10 price type.

The new registration pages sits on a subdomain of the Sadler’s Wells main website that users can be signposted to, or Sadler’s Wells have the option to embed it in alternative locations using an iframe.

The RSC TikTok tickets registration follows a similar structure, with an added initial step that identifies whether or not the user already has a customer account in Tessitura using a two-step verification. To do this, we ask the user to supply their email address and then run a check using the Action Links Tessitura integration to identify any matching constituent records. If we find an account that does already exist, we ask the user to input their password and then proceed to the TikTok registration form. If there is no matching account, we ask the user to create one. However rather than redirecting them to the native TNEW create account page to do this (which requires over 10 different form fields to be populated), we instead only ask the user to provide the bare essentials of their first and last name using these to create a new constituent record.

Once the user has logged in, they are then asked to confirm whether they are either a full time student, or aged 14-25. Similar to Sadler’s Wells, the RSC can configure the validation criteria of a date of birth field to prevent users who are not aged between 14 and 25 from progressing. On submission, Action Links then adds a TikTok Tickets constituency to the constituent record which instantly allows the user to then book their £10 tickets (the RSC facilitate the discount by using the constituency to trigger a pricing rule applied to the TNEW basket, rather than unlocking a specific price type like Sadler’s Wells). Because the user is already logged in and Action Links has created a session, they are able to transition smoothly straight to TNEW without being asked to log in again.

Due to the flexibility of the Action Links CMS, this approach can be used for multiple different tailored sign up forms that automatically adds specific identifiers to a customer record to gate access to benefits (be that a mailing list; a discount price; a specific allocation of held seats). This could include access schemes, waiting lists, or specific newsletters - whatever type of sign up you need to offer, each time you can tailor the exact data you require from a user and the options you give them (e.g. only particular Interests and Contact Permissions) and choose how you’d like to configure submitted sign ups to store in Tessitura.