With any ticketing system, we have access to a lot of data. Unfortunately, not all ticketing systems can spit that data back out in useful ways. Most reports are rather standard and can be exported to Excel but not everyone is an Excel guru that can turn all of that data in to useful insights about ticket buyer behavior.
Last season, when faced with a ton of raw data in the form of ticket buyer lists for all of our performances, we searched for a way to make our myriad Excel spreadsheets into something usable for a reasonable price. My dream was to turn all of it into retention, response, and multi-buyer reports but I didn’t think I would be able to do it without spending beaucoup bucks.
Enter Odesk.com. Odesk is a website where you can hire freelancers with all sorts of different skills to do project work for you. You can search for people who are skilled at Excel and data manipulation, check out their hourly rate, inquire as to whether they can do the project, and then hire them all through the website.
We were fortunate to find a particular freelancer who has now done lots of projects for us including a single ticket buyer retention report that is very similar to the one that you pay a lot of money for using one of the super fancy ticketing systems.
He also does regular response reports from various mailings for us at a fraction of the cost of all of the mailhouses and consulting firms out there. I might get some hate mail for saying that but I just can’t afford to spend $500 every time I want to compare mailing lists to ticket buyers lists. I’m sure that many of you are in the same boat.
So, if you want to get control of your ticket buyer (or donor) data and turn it into actionable insights, try a site like Odesk to make sense of your data to be able to make informed decisions. Insights like these aren’t just for the big budget companies anymore. You can have them too!
