Arts People vs. ON24

Arts People is one of the best business decisions our theatre has ever made. It relieves staff of some of the tedious, time-consuming tasks while increasing the ease of selling tickets and subscriptions. That's our goal--to sell tickets easily, in a user-friendly manner at a reasonable cost. That's what Arts People allows us to do. It works for tiny venues (to greet each guest personally) as well as huge venues (ticket scanning solution). It is less appropriate for a one-time event. An Arts People user should have an ongoing series of events to take advantage of all the features (it even has a membership feature) and the time for training.

Incentivized

Having a platform where you can engage customers. It’s not only about the presentation, the polling, and customer engagement allows us to get feedback from customers. A major win for us is that it requires zero software to be downloaded. Running it within the browser window is such a huge impact. When webinar providers have software involved there could be issues with the end user trying to install and run it due to security settings or software.

Incentivized

• Their customer service is unsurpassed. Sometimes several folks will be working on different aspects of a complicated request, to address all the details. Once things are exactly the way I want it, as in season subscription package sales, a representative checks in to make sure we're satisfied. Only then is the ticket closed.
• They have a very comprehensive, full featured ticketing system for all types of events and venues. Their dynamic door list is our favorite feature--no static printed door lists for us. That helps us greet each patron with up-to-date information and check them off the list. While my box officers are doing that, I can be at a remote location and see in real time who has arrived. We can make collaborative decisions about, for instance, holding the curtain for a critics arrival or adding a chair for an unexpected guest of a ticket-holder. We can keep a couple of tickets on hold for box officer discretion to address those unforeseen ticket window requests. Great flexibility which allows us to be efficient while giving good customer service to our patrons.
• Even though the system is full-featured, it is not beyond the skills of those who considers themselves non-technical. Two sessions of training will get a box officer up-and-running. Because there are different levels of access, we don't have to worry about someone changing essential programming while they are checking in patrons.
• They made their ticket landing page look like our website, so people don't even realize that they have been taken somewhere else. Plus, the patron can easily navigate back to our actual site, seamlessly.

Incentivized

• Webinars hosted in ON24 run smoothly and never lag, and the help desk is very responsive.
• Detailed analytics in every field include surveys, unique clicks, and downloads.
• Registration details and multi-registration links in ON24 are very helpful and allow us to add additional registration fields and restrict certain domains.

Incentivized

• Anything I've asked for, I've gotten so I don't see any need for improvement at the moment.

Incentivized

• ON24 sometimes does not work well with some of our clients firewall and VPN if they are attempting to join from their office.
• ON24 can sometimes freeze and our trainers are unable to resolve the issue and are forced to reschedule the session or move to another platform available.
• ON24 does not track the correct data for our number of registrants for forums events. So, the analytics component is not valuable to us.

Incentivized

Our Marketing team has seen significant time savings with the number of webinars we produce since using ON24. It's very scalable, and the onboarding and training for a new team member is fairly easy. The customer support of the ON24 team has also been impressive. They also release new feature on a fairly regular basis, and the webinars they do focused on customers are beneficial.

Incentivized

97% of our attendees say it is the best trainings they have every attended. But they other 3% have a horrible experience (while watching the event live) interesting fact. On24 uses two different encoders for live vs OnDemand. I have never had issues with the On-Demand experience. My only complaints come during live events

Incentivized

ON24 is always available when I have a question about a new feature, if I'm having issues during a live webinar, or if I'm having issues with a webinar on the backend. Our client support specialist, Heather Haines, has always been incredibly consistent with getting me the answers I need when I need them.

Incentivized

Loading depends on how large the files in the webinar for us - sometimes it takes up to an hour to upload and that impacts the loading when the webcast is playing. Overall I'm happy with the performance, however if integrated with other systems it does tend to slow down the process

Incentivized

ON24 support is really good with the 24/5 support chat line, where someone actually responds within 30 seconds. The customers success team is also really good and our rep is very helpful with all our questions. Whenever we have more technical questions, she will bring on a IT designer or a tech specialist on our calls for additional comments and help.

Incentivized

Most points of relevance were covered as far as I can remember.

Incentivized

On24 has amazing ON-Demand trainings that you can use at anytime and they walk you through step by step on different topics/ they are always updating and innovating and putting out new trainings. I would highly reccomend the trainings and reading the documents they have created. They also do live webinars on a rolling basis that are filled with so much knowledge and Information

Incentivized

We had a few training's, which were broken up, and focused on specific areas of how to use the platform. Mostly though, a lot of it is just dedicating your time to learning and exploring what the possibilities are for enhancing your webinars

• Eventbrite is better for single, one-time events but isn't as full-featured as Arts People.
• Brown Paper Tickets is clunky to use and harder to change globally when an event changes or adds shows.
• Vendini--never used it because when I researched 10 different ticketing companies, they were the least helpful. They didn't listen to our needs, and instead told us what we should have. They were much more expensive than Arts People as well.
• Constant Contact is truly great as a marketing tool. But their events feature was awkward and the payment method was Paypal. However, since it's integrated with Arts People, we can use Arts People for sales and Constant Contact for marketing.

Incentivized

We selected ON24 due to organizational alignment and tool consolidation but I am more than happy with the decision to move over to this tool. It has been by far the easiest and least frustrating webinar tool I have used in 5+ years of digital marketing. It allows me to bring the product marketers asks closer to reality.

Incentivized

The ON24 platform is straightforward to use and train clients on, which is a huge plus. Clients appreciate its features and simplicity. Internally, we receive valuable analytical data from webinar events, enabling the organization to make data-driven decisions. This helps us optimize strategies and drive success for B2B businesses effectively.

• Positive - Our online vs phone call or in-person sales have increased steadily over the past 4 years since using Arts People. Less labor for us, more sales.
• Positive - People are buying their tickets earlier than they used to - to reserve a coveted seat in a possible sold-out performance. That makes planning our marketing easier--whether to offer HotTix or special coded offers for shows that have fewer sales.
• Negative - Some older folks still have problems with redeeming their subscription tickets for individual tickets without our personal assistance. We've been trying to pinpoint what that is--and Arts People helped us make a few adjustments. Sometimes people don't like to log in. That's one of the challenges of an integrated system. If the patron's profile changes in a way that impacts their subscription links, we need to step in. However, the overall time it has saved us in managing subscriptions is immeasurable.

Incentivized

• By holding more webinars (and promoting them beyond our existing client database), we have generated thousands of new contacts.
• The ease of use has enabled us to add an additional tool to our marketing toolbox without having to hire deep webinar/events specialists.
• The integration with Salesforce has enabled our relationship owners to see how engaged their client contacts are.

Incentivized