Monmouthshire Show: Simplifying setup and increasing advanced sales
With the first edition taking place way back in 1857, Monmouthshire Show is historically one of the biggest and best-loved agricultural shows in Wales.
For the 2024 edition - only the second instalment following an enforced three-year break - the festival organisers wanted to continue rebuilding the event after a challenging time that saw the industry lose several similar shows.
Following the success of the event in August 2024, which welcomed thousands of visitors throughout the day, we spoke with Show Management Secretary Cathy Tindell to discuss her experience of using FIXR for the first time.
Boosting advanced sales
A primary reason for using FIXR for this year's event was pushing advanced sales. We sold significantly more tickets in advance this year than last year, which was brilliant.
In total, almost 50% of our total ticket sales came through advance sales on FIXR. That's far more than we would normally expect.
Having such a significant amount sold in advance was really, really positive. For us, the higher that upfront number and percentage, the better.
It's so much quicker to scan a ticket than to take payment on the gate, and knowing that you've got that income from advance ticket sales means a certain amount of your costs are covered.
If we could go to a completely advance-ticket-only system that would be wonderful, but agricultural shows don't really work like that because people tend to wait to see what the weather will be like!
Exploring age demographics
Normally the people who buy in advance are younger people who have grown up with technology and for whom it's second nature.
This year we had a much higher number of older people buying tickets online. It was very positive to see those ticket sales from that demographic.
Using the FIXR dashboard to look at the age range of those buying tickets in advance is so useful.
We were surprised to note a peak at around 57 years old, but also spikes at 66 and 69. Traditionally, in our experience, these would have been people who would have preferred to buy tickets in person on the day rather than online, so that was really interesting to see.
Scanning tickets
The scanners worked really well. With the show still growing after an extended break, it was hard to predict how many scanners we needed and we will tweak this going forward, but the process of scanning tickets was seamless.
We did experience a few people coming to the gate who weren’t completely sure how to get their tickets on their phones but we were able to carry out a simple name check on FIXR to confirm pretty much instantly whether they'd bought a ticket.
Control and flexibility
The ability to customise events is a big selling point for FIXR.
Being able to go to our events and tickets myself and make adjustments - to extend the dates on one type of ticket or shut down sales completely on another - is extremely useful.
I appreciated being able to make those changes as and when required. FIXR have an excellent technical support team in place to provide guidance where needed.
Working with FIXR also means that we don’t need to have our own merchant account or deal with any of our own card processing fees. FIXR takes care of all that for us and it is included in the percentage fee that we pay them, we know what we're getting without any hidden charges.
It's so straightforward; from our point of view FIXR has been brilliant.
Get in touch to discover how FIXR can help you manage your events, boost ticket sales and build an engaged audience.