Tickets, please?

Selling tickets to events is a common ask for a PTA. Until now we’ve taken payments one of three ways:

• cash sales in advance or on the door;
• taking payments through the school’s own parent comms system; or
• bookings in advance with cash collected on the night.

All have their merits – but with the number of parents at the school gate falling, an online solution is becoming more important. The school’s own system provides that, but is a “per child” rather than “per parent” system, and is hardly seamless – we tell the office who to bill how much.

So… it’s time to take the plunge and look at online options.

What do we want?

• ease of purchase – how many clicks does it take?
• cost – we’re a charity – how much will we lose – hopefully to be made up by extra sales?
• ticket scanning – we’re a small school – but we might we want this in future?
• other options – can we use it to sell second hand uniform and the like?

Comparing sites

Comparing sites is hard, as they all charge a variety of fixed vs % vs per ticket fees.

As a rough ready reckoner to compare:

• PTA Events, Ticket Tailor, BookWhen, EventBrite and TryBooking – these are all sites that offer specific functionality for ticket sales and inventory management; and
• Wix and SquareSpace – which are more generic website tools, but which both offer an eCommerce plugin.

The spreadsheet below compares their plans as at 1 October 2022 – fill in the green boxes. I put this together very quickly, so you should of course do your own homework and check my sums!