Case Study: Bay Area Children's Theatre adds assigned seating for ticket sales with CiviCRM

Bay Area Children's Theatre adds assigned seating to CiviCRM in 2012 with FusionTicket

Bay Area Children's Theatre, a growing theatre organization, faced a challenge with its ticket sales as it expanded. Its existing system, CiviCRM's CiviEvent, was successfully used for general admission sales but lacked the assigned seating functionality required for larger audiences and group sales. The customer needed a cost-effective ticketing solution that would integrate with CiviCRM to preserve their invaluable patron data, avoiding expensive traditional software or SaaS options that charged per-ticket fees.

The solution involved integrating the open-source FusionTicket project with CiviCRM. A custom module was developed to connect the two systems, allowing seat maps to be assigned to events and displayed on the registration page. This integration enabled patrons to select their own seats, with the selections then displayed on confirmation pages and synced with the CiviCRM participant records. While the solution is still experimental, it allows Bay Area Children's Theatre to use CiviCRM for assigned seating without losing access to its rich donor and patron data, providing a powerful and customizable alternative to expensive external services.

Bay Area Children's Theatre