Effortless online enrolment for education activities

As well as a renowned turnover of gigs and performances, the Roundhouse in London have an ambitious year-round programme of professional development for young people including practical skill boosting workshops; workspaces and studio facilities and long-terms courses. This is a key pillar in their mission to raise the creative potential of the UK (the Roundhouse work with 10,000 young people each year through creative programmes), so when they came to Action Links to explore how they can make access to these opportunities easier for bookers, we were excited to help find a solution that contributed to such vital work.

The challenge

Every year the Roundhouse run multiple different events and courses for young people who are part of their Creatives Studios membership programme, all targeted at specific age groups. Some of these don’t require any booking and are drop-in activities, whilst others require advance booking and for attendees to declare their demographics and photo consent.

This volume and nature of ‘personal details’ is not something most online ticketing pathways are set up to collect, so historically the Roundhouse had heavy customisations with their web developers  in order to capture this info at the point of booking.

Coupled with additional paper forms that bookers needed to complete on arrival at the event, the Roundhouse were just about able to collect the necessary audience data that they required for reporting. However paper forms required manual data processing and the digital customisations for online bookings were vulnerable to breakages from updates in their tech stack.

When the time came to change their ticketing path system to TNEW, the Roundhouse took this opportunity to seek out an alternative solution for Creatives Studio bookings and enrolment.

The brief

The Roundhouse team worked with Action Links to create an online journey that would…

• Offer a streamlined way for parents and young people to provide personal details of the participant, at the same time as making a booking (removing the need for paper forms and manual data processing)
• Automatically store collected data in Tessitura, creating or updating customer records with relevant details to unlock access to book age-appropriate events 
• Prevent users from proceeding to book, if their age is outside of the permitted age group for specific events
• Make relevant associations between parent and young person customer records in the CRM database
• Transfer eligible users to the TNEW checkout to process transactions, after completing all pre-booking registration steps

Using our integration with Tessitura, the team have delivered a fully automated solution that uses Action Links to act as both the data collection and user validation steps between the Roundhouse’s marketing website and the TNEW checkout.

The solution

One of the first aspects we tackled was at which point in the wider user journey we were going to validate the participant's age and collect their personal details. A user needed to begin their journey on the Roundhouse marketing website by selecting an event, and finish their journey in the TNEW checkout to complete their booking (regardless of whether the event was free or required payment). So a solution was needed that sat between the website and TNEW. Because Action Links pages sit on a subdomain and can share sessions across other platforms, we were able to create a flow that slots the required steps missing from their native checkout, into a journey that transitions the user from the website, over to an Action Links multi-step form, before finally landing on the TNEW checkout page.

Next, we needed to verify the participant’s age for their chosen event. Action Links prompts the user to log in with TNEW credentials or register a new account. If a parent/guardian is booking on behalf of a young person, at this point we also capture participant name and ensure that a customer account is created for them with a clear record of the booking associated with their account. The participant’s date of birth is requested (or pre-filled if already stored in Tessitura), before Action Links performs a check to validate that their age meets the event requirements - we do this by looking at a keyword on the event in Tessitura. Ineligible participants are then blocked from proceeding.

We then need the user to enrol to the Roundhouse Creative Studios membership (a requirement to be able to complete the booking) and also collect their demographic details, required for reporting purposes. As the user moves through these enrolment steps by answering a series of questions, Action Links logic prevents spam data being entered (e.g. email addresses must contain ‘@’), whilst conditional routing ensures that each participant is only asked questions relevant to them and their preceding answers.

Because the data collected includes protected characteristic demographics, it needs to be stored securely—avoiding spreadsheets or inboxes. For the Roundhouse, Tessitura was the safest option but the team wanted control over exactly where within the database this data was stored in order to restrict access to specific staff groups. Because the Action Links integration with Tessitura accesses over 400 Tessitura API endpoints, the Roundhouse were able to map each piece of collected data to write back to different locations that they needed it be stored in, including Attributes and CSIs.

The participant has now met all the necessary criteria and is ready to checkout and confirm their booking. At this stage, Action Links takes the user’s responses and writes them back to Tessitura before redirecting the user to the TNEW cart, adding the relevant event to the basket and retaining the logged in session status that was created when the user logged in at the start of the Action Links journey.

The impact

Roundhouse’s new Action Links booking journey doesn’t just look better — it works better. Paper forms have been replaced with a streamlined, mobile-first experience that feeds participant data directly into Tessitura from day one. The result? Faster enrolments, cleaner reporting, and critical data captured exactly when it matters most.