How the AFL accepted card payments with no terminals through the VFL Finals

What is the most effective way to manage ticketing when you have an event where most attendees want to pay upon entry?

<h2>The Challenge</h2>
What is the most effective way to manage ticketing when you have an event where most attendees want to pay upon entry? This question was critical for the Victorian Football League (<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>) as they approached their Finals series which anticipated crowds largely comprised of walk-up sales. To complicate the picture, this series extended over multiple weekends with multiple venues; all of which had different levels of ticketing infrastructure, no unified approach to event day sales and no way to ensure capacity management or safe cash handling for high volume events!
<h2>The Solution</h2>
Enter the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/apple-tap-to-pay-on-iphone" target="_blank" rel="noopener">INTIX Box Office</a>, an app-based ticketing box office that works directly from any smart device. The first company in Australia to offer&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/apple-tap-to-pay-on-iphone" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tap to Pay on iPhone</a>, INTIX Box Office allows you to sell tickets directly from your smartphone in seconds with complete security.
<h3>Low-resource and Low-cost Event Sales</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.intix.com.au/apple-tap-to-pay-on-iphone" target="_blank" rel="noopener">INTIX Box Office with Tap to Pay</a>&nbsp;works to transform your smartphone into a single solution to the multiple pieces of infrastructure that are usually required to run a box-office. It can be costly not only to invest in hardware like point-of-sale terminals, payment terminals, ticket printers, and wi-fi dongles, but they also need regular updating and quickly age out of being able to be integrated with changing technology. Alongside these costs, there are the logistical challenges of making sure this hardware gets to each venue, that equipment is set up and tested before gates open, and has access to power or reliable wi-fi across your event (a big challenge for outdoor events). With INTIX Box Office, the event administrator can set up all the conditions for ticket sales remotely and on the event day it is as simple as downloading an app to your phone!</li>
<li>With traditional approached, with so many systems and hardware in play, it can be time consuming to train event staff and often requires senior staff to be on hand to offer technical troubleshooting during busy events. With INTIX Box Office, training is as simple as providing instructions to download an app, inviting staff to login to the event, and less than 2 minutes to demonstrate how to use the app to complete a sale. Having one user friendly solution with no capital investment in hardware transformed the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>&nbsp;event-day ticketing into a low-resource and low-cost outcome; saving on infrastructure, operational and staffing cost and resources.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>"The Club has been delighted with the services provided [by INTIX] both in preparation and delivery...and we have been delighted we made the decision to engage their services. The Carlton Football Club prides itself on presenting the highest standard to our stakeholders...and I am pleased to advise the team at INTIX have delivered and met these expectations." - Martin Shannon</blockquote>
<h3>Easy Event Days</h3>
<ul>
<li>With INTIX, both sales and ticket scanning can be completed on a single device through downloading easy to use apps. The best benefits here aren’t just savings on infrastructure, staffing and logistics, the apps facilitate event entries with ease and speed. The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>&nbsp;Finals were a high-capacity event series and the combination of INTIX Box Office and 2.0 Scanning apps allowed entry processes to be streamlined, making waiting in lines a thing of the past and ultimately creating the best possible event experience for attendees from the moment they reached the ground!</li>
<li>INTIX apps require connection to a phone network and use a very small amount of data. Event staff responded positively to using their own devices at events; the convenience and familiarity of using their own devices encouraged confidence and self-sufficiency, allowing them to focus on the most important part of their job: getting attendees into the event with ease! For events that may prefer to use tablet devices or may only have access to wi-fi, Stripe Bluetooth payment readers can be easily connected as an alternative way of taking payment.</li>
</ul>
<h3>The Bigger Picture Benefits</h3>
<ul>
<li>Audience growth is a built-in feature of INTIX as purchasers are easily able to become subscribers to your organisation. The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>&nbsp;saw unprecedented digital pre-sales for their events as the season continued as they were able to announce when new events went on sale to their existing Finals audience. Using the INTIX Marketing suite involves no additional costs, allows you to send event announcements, emails and push notifications to your subscribers with ease and, just like the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>, encourages great sales conversion. The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>&nbsp;observed 10x growth in both online sales and audience growth over the first 3 weeks of their Finals. (update with growth analytics from finals!!)</li>
<li>There are additional organisational benefits to using the Tap-to-Pay solution through INTIX Box Office. While online ticketing gives you direct insight into who is purchasing tickets to your events, typically walk-up sales are a mystery. With tokenised Stripe payments, any cards used previously in the INTIX system will be recognised and fed into your audience analytics. For the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>, this data is essential to understanding their audiences and setting up the league for informed growth.</li>
<li>It can be daunting, but there are a lot of reasons to consider switching to cashless payment options for events and the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>&nbsp;Finals are a great example of the benefits of this change. Post-Covid, most of the public are well-educated in cashless payments in retail and event spaces. For the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>, there were some reservations about transitioning to cashless payments; would the walk-up crowd for match days expect to be able to pay cash and how much of a problem would this create? In practice, these concerns proved unfounded. Across the season less than a handful of customers came only armed with cash and it was easy for someone friendly with a card to make a purchase on behalf of these individuals. As the season progressed, attendees became aware of cashless payment and came prepared for card payments, even noting directly to staff how this was making entry to the games faster and easier.</li>
<li>While&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/apple-tap-to-pay-on-iphone" target="_blank" rel="noopener">INTIX Box Office</a>&nbsp;offers the ability to charge a sale to cash – you are invoiced for your ticketing fees on these sales post-event– it’s worth considering whether offering cash sales is truly benefiting your business. Cash handling is resource intensive and fraught with error; beyond costly payment infrastructure, you need to organise cash floats, you require security for cash handling, and there is the messy business of reconciliation after the event. If cash payment is a requirement of only a fraction of your event attendees, the costs of including this convenience may no longer add up and the INTIX Box Office solution is for you; one device taking all sales with all income reconciled directly in your Stripe account with no margin for error.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>"As a club that is always looking to innovate and provide better [operations] we were keen to find a ticketing system [INTIX] that could provide us with CRM, Marketing, Game Day and Event access and more. The INTIX system has provided us with all of this and we have found it a great product." - Paul Malcolm</blockquote>
<h2>The Outcomes</h2>
With a single low-cost and easy to implement solution for sales and scanning, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>&nbsp;were able to manage gate sales in a way that reduced administrative and staffing support while creating a great walk-up experience for event attendees. Add to this a huge boost to pre-sales and audience growth through the INTIX ecosystem and you have an unbeatable system for ticket sales and audience management.
<h3>How do we make it happen?</h3>
With INTIX , both sales and scanning can be managed with a single device and the INTIX team makes the transition to these systems a breeze and our support team make sure implementation is pain-free. Taking the time to understand your events and the unique needs of your audiences, INTIX staff are well positioned to advise on the best approaches to ticketing your event. We offer dedicated client management to onboard staff and provide ongoing support for using INTIX. For the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>&nbsp;this included direct training with event administrators, video meetings to guide individual Clubs through systems prior to event days, and alongside supplementary guides to refer to on the day, allowed them to confidently train event staff and volunteers in scanning and sales in minutes. INTIX also offers out-of-hours tech support directly with our Melbourne based team and can assist with staffing support for major events. At all points of your ticketing journey, INTIX makes sure you have the back up you need, when you need it most.
<blockquote>"We have been extremely fortunate to partner with INTIX...who have provided the resources, care and support needed to ensure our customers have a great experience at the footy." - Marcus Ashcroft</blockquote>
While&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>&nbsp;finals may be large scale events, the combination of using INTIX for easy Tap to Pay sales on event day sales and ticket scanning is something that can be scaled to any size of event. The advantages remain true, you minimise infrastructure costs, event administration and staffing requirements as benefits to your business while making event entry easy and seamless for your attendees.
If you are looking for the same great results audience growth and event experience for your next ticketed event.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/organizer/request-a-demo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Reach out</a>&nbsp;to us to let us know how we can revolutionize your ticketing and audience management.

<h2>The Challenge</h2>
What is the most effective way to manage ticketing when you have an event where most attendees want to pay upon entry? This question was critical for the Victorian Football League (<a href="https://www.intix.com.au/org/vfl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">VFL</a>) as they approached their Finals series which anticipated crowds largely comprised of walk-up sales. To complicate the picture, this series extended over multiple weekends with multiple venues; all of which had different levels of ticketing infrastructure, no unified approach to event day sales and no way to ensure capacity management or safe cash handling for high volume events!