How Trinity Ents got 1000 new followers in a week

Home to around 20,000 students, Trinity College Dublin is one of Ireland's biggest, best and most popular universities.

Throughout the year, the students union TCDSU runs events for the student population under the name Trinity Ents - spanning weekly club nights, wellbeing events, comedy shows, film screenings, and most famously the Trinity Ball.

Since joining FIXR in 2021, Trinity Ents have sold almost 40,000 tickets across more than 100 events, racking up nearly 300,000 page views along the way.

We spoke with Olivia Orr, Ents Officer for TCDSU, about how FIXR has helped her committee to successfully run events for the student population, and how it has been "such a handy platform in so many different ways".

How long have you been using FIXR, and what kind of events do you offer?

I have been TCDSU Ents Officer since the end of June 2023, but I've been on the Ents Committee for the past two years before that, so I've used FIXR for years now.

In second year I was the JCR Ents Officer: that’s the entertainment officer for Trinity Hall. We used FIXR as the ticketing platform during that year so I've been well-versed in FIXR, and have been using it since 2021.

The events really differ; we've obviously done clubs nights, we've done movie nights, pub quizzes, Bingo Loco, kind of everything and anything.

This year, over freshers and the first two weeks back on campus, we ran about 40 events and then since freshers week we've run at least one or two events per week.

Which FIXR features have helped you to successfully market and run your events?

Followers

We got 1000 new followers on FIXR within a week during freshers!

We only ticketed the nights out, so that was just from people going to all the different club nights wanting to keep up to date with them. They're definitely the tickets that we sell the most of, and that's how we'll gain our most followers; from people buying those.

‌‌The recent followers update where ticket buyers who subscribe start following you was really good for us.

We communicate about our events through Instagram, but obviously a lot of people don't use Instagram so it's really good that those people will still be notified whenever tickets go live via FIXR itself. It gives us another way to reach our audience.

Ticket Tiers

The ability to have different ticket tiers definitely helps us sell more tickets.

We can add however many different ticket tiers that we want, with different volumes and prices. That creates a lot more ammunition for marketing the event.

We know exactly when to post a message on our Instagram to say “Early Bird tier has sold out; make sure to grab your General Admission now before it moves to Final Sale".

It's really good that FIXR allows us to do that.

How has FIXR helped to improve students' experience and shape future events?

Audience insights & analytics

It's been really positive to have audience insights and analytics on our FIXR dashboard.

After freshers week did a deep dive into it all, just to see which events were catering to who.

It has been interesting to see what events are more attended by male or female audiences, and it's really good to see that there are people who are maybe in gender minorities that feel comfortable coming to certain things.

Seeing that maybe women and other gender minorities might not feel good about going to a particular venue as much as another venue, we’ve taken that on board and stopped using certain venues.

Another big thing, especially with college students, it’s really good that we can see the age of people that are coming to our events.

Map functionality on event pages

Hosting events in venues on and off campus, the fact that we can show the location on a map is huge for us.

From feedback we've got from students, people love that so much. It’s really been a lifesaver for students. Especially for freshers week where people don't really know the city, or where they're going.

It also saves us having to post a map or directions and clogging up our Instagram, where we communicate with most students.

Plus, people can easily see that it's going to be at that really fun venue that they love, or if they don't like a specific venue they can ensure they don’t buy a ticket for that event.

How has the support been from the FIXR team?

We’ve really, really enjoyed working with FIXR... I feel very supported.

[Partnerships Manager] Sam and [Account Manager] Hope have been amazing; texting and checking in, asking if I'm having any issues and stuff like that. If there was an issue, I would know where to voice it, and I feel very comfortable that it would be resolved quickly.

There’s been a lot of other ticketing companies coming to talk to us, and we've never felt the need to change; I'm really enjoying FIXR and all of my committee really enjoy using FIXR as well.

We had an incident where I accidentally set the event location for a mystery night to somewhere in a different time zone. I didn't notice it, but someone from FIXR reached out to me a week before the event to let me know.

They were so helpful and got it completely sorted, updated everyone's tickets, it was just so seamless. It would have been panic central otherwise. That was really, really amazing.

If you'd like to find out more about how FIXR can help make your events a success, please get in touch below - we'd love to hear from you!