A good call for selling tickets?

By DON MURET
Staff writer
Published February 04, 2008 : Page 08

The day before Thanksgiving, 100,000 Boston College season-ticket holders and alumni got an unexpected phone call from Eagles quarterback Matt Ryan.

Ryan asked them in a recorded message to buy tickets to see BC play in the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game in Jacksonville.

Ryan’s call, issued through the Vontoo voice-messaging system, resulted in BC’s athletic department selling 4,000 tickets priced at $85 and $125, “a good solid rate of return for the campaign they were doing,” said Vontoo co-founder Dustin Sapp.

Some fans unable to attend the game chose Ryan’s alternative option and bought several hundred tickets, then gave them back to the school, which distributed them to nonprofits in Jacksonville.

Boston College considers the $10,000 it paid to use Vontoo a worthwhile investment because the school had to quickly spread the word about ticket and travel information for a game taking place in less than two weeks, said Jamie DiLoreto, associate athletic director of external operations.

Vontoo’s system sends recordings from athletes
like Matt Ryan to prospective ticket buyers.

Vontoo, a 2 1/2-year-old Indianapolis company, has 35 sports accounts, including 16 colleges, six NBA teams and two NFL clubs. It charges those clients 10 cents or less per call based on the volume of messages sent to their constituents, Sapp said.

Boston College’s DiLoreto and ticketing executives from the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and MLB’s Cincinnati Reds said they enjoy using Vontoo because of the ease with which their players can record audio messages and the computerized system’s ability to track customer response rates.

“The online reporting system is great,” said Craig Warman, the Reds’ director of client services. “We can take the results and download the data into an Excel format for additional analysis.”

The system allows those receiving a player’s phone call to push a button and be transferred to a live agent to order tickets. The length of the message can be shortened during the call campaign if people are hanging up 10 seconds into a 30- to 45-second recording.

“It’s easier than upgrading our internal voice-mail system,” said Dennis O’Connor, vice president of ticket sales for the Memphis Grizzlies.

The Grizzlies have used Vontoo on several occasions to sell tickets and inform their season-ticket holders and individual ticket buyers about coaching and senior management changes in the organization.

“We use e-mail too, but 75 percent of our ticket accounts we have e-mails for, compared to 100 percent of their phone numbers, so we hit everybody,” O’Connor said.

Last season, the NBA team sold 1,500 discounted tickets for one game, resulting in $33,000 in revenue, that was tied to a jersey giveaway surrounding rookie forward Rudy Gay.

The Grizzlies used a Web browser to log into the Vontoo system that connected to the phone Gay used to record his message. The call was sent out the Monday before the Friday game to 6,000 people who had previously bought single-game tickets. The cost to the team was $650.