Case Study: City of London Club achieves secure, barcode-based event ticketing and fraud prevention with CiviCRM

Secure Event Ticketing using CiviCRM & Barcodes

City of London Club moved its membership database from MS Access to CiviCRM in 2010 and faced fragmented event-management processes and a ticketing system open to fraud — tickets had no event title, unique ID or series number. The club needed a secure, barcode-based ticketing solution integrated with its membership records and event workflows (using CiviEvent and Drupal).

Using CiviCRM (with CiviEvent and later CiviContribute), Edutech Insight specified a barcode PDF ticketing module that generates a unique ID from member, event and seat data; Circle Interactive developed the module and the secretariat can reprint or mail tickets and track attendance. The new CiviCRM-based solution eliminated the obvious ticket-fraud vector and, after launch, unprinted-ticket incidents fell from about 20% at the first event to ~5% after four months, while roughly 10% of transactions still require phone support; the ticketing extension will be released to the CiviCRM community.

City of London