With regards to colleges and universities, INTIX professionals ticket all sorts of live events — from sports competitions to dance recitals to various stage performances. For many involved, no events are more important — and more pressure-packed — than graduation ceremonies. After all, graduation is the climax, the culmination of years of study, toil and considerable expense. Walking across that stage to receive a diploma is one of the seminal moments of many people’s lives.
With late May and June being the prime time of such events, and now that the dust has settled from those latest commencements, we called on several of our association members to share their experiences from a ticketing standpoint.
Ticketing Graduations vs. Other Events
Just how different is ticketing graduations from basketball games, concerts and other campus events? Jonathan Boulter, Director of Ticketing and Patron Services for Virginia Tech University’s Center for the Arts, says there are many differences. “During graduation week, we have so many events that are taking place that week, and we typically have three ticketed graduation ceremonies. We try to create a template that works for all the colleges, but every ceremony is different.”
He continues, “In our template, we have the maximum number of graduates that we can accommodate and then the maximum number of guests. Since that time of year is so busy for our box office as we are starting our subscription sales for the next season, I try to work with the colleges and give them their allotted tickets and let them deal with the distribution of the tickets. This removes our box office from having to deal with the issues of graduation tickets.”
Liz Baqir
Liz Baqir, Ticketing Services Manager for Cal Performances, states, “This year, we serviced 38 commencement ceremonies in three different venues — ranging in size from 500 seats to 6,000 seats — over an eight-day period. Every department has different needs, different prices, different rules and — to a certain extent — different policies. The sheer volume of information the ticket office has to keep track of and accurately disseminate is overwhelming.”
Baqir describes graduation week itself as an "all-hands-on-deck" scenario and “a marathon.” She says, “Much of our staff work multiple 15-hour days during that week. We provide meals and golf carts and treats and try to take extra good care of each other, because it can be challenging.”
An extra layer of challenge for our interviewees is the fact that the patrons are, for the most part, not their regular patrons. Cate Foltin, Business Manager for the Macomb Center for the Performing Arts in Michigan, notes, “For some families, this may be the first generation to graduate from college. So, the excitement is at a different level. It also means that sometimes more people want to attend beyond capacity and getting to understand that the school may not be able to distribute enough tickets to accommodate everyone.”
Additionally, some students and their families may not tell Foltin and her staff that a family member needs accessible seating. That, in turn, runs the risk of far more attendees with special needs arriving than her venue is set up to accommodate. She says, “We make it work, but the last thing we want to do is put family members into an overflow area where they are viewing on a screen in the next building or theatre.”
Jon Secunda
Jon Secunda, Director of Box Office at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and his staff typically ticket five to seven different college commencements and more than a dozen high school graduations each spring within a roughly two-week span. Except for the COVID year of 2020, these entities have traditionally been reluctant to go with digital tickets. “We always ended up printing [general admission, or GA] hard tickets and giving them to the school to distribute ahead of time.”
These allotments could range from 3,500 to 6,500 tickets per school. That would mean a week of all his office’s printers humming eight hours a day while he and staffers banded ticket stacks until the job was done — a very manual process.
“Full disclosure,” Secunda states. “Almost all the schools moved away from having us do the tickets this year. Thank goodness! Since the ceremonies are all GA, most moved to a pre-distributed wristband system. We do still ticket our suites digitally for commencements. Any fully unused suite can be purchased on a first-come, first-serve basis for a flat rate of $500. That does not include any food or beverage service. And for the first time in facility history, we did ticketed, paid parking for the close proximity lots around the arena. These were mostly sold in advance, online.”
Lessons Learned
So, what did our interviewees learn from this year’s ceremonies? And will they do anything different next time around?
Once again, Boulter was among the first to answer: “Each graduation ceremony has its own vibe and feeling depending on the college that is represented. We have one ceremony that runs by the book every year. The event planners have it down to a science. We hand them the tickets, and they are set! We know exactly how long the event is going to be and exactly what to expect.”
There is another ceremony that he describes as “very chill and relaxed” that can last for three-plus hours. He states, “The one thing I've learned from graduations is that weather has a huge impact on how many guests show up for the ceremonies. Even though we are an inside venue, if there is even a hint of bad weather, the numbers will drop.”
Meanwhile, Foltin has discovered that college students “can be remarkably creative in creating faux tickets,” and security measures must be taken as a result. Anne Staudinger, Ticket Office Manager for Arizona State University Gammage, has found that “expected attendance is never correct … It’s best to keep notes of all graduations and use them to get a better idea of attendance for future years.”
For her part, Baqir urges any ticketing professional reading this and responsible for future graduations to “have a good spreadsheet! It's critical to have one central repository for all of the information for every commencement, and that you keep that resource updated and current.”
Dealing With the People
And, as mentioned earlier, ticketing graduations comes with its own special set of pressures. Some of our interviewees had some interesting anecdotes of handling past commencements — memories they’re just now getting around to smiling and chuckling about. Foltin, for one, laughs in stating, “The most interesting and challenging issues to address are those requests from family members who do not want to sit together for whatever reason!”
Secunda laughingly recalls various parents expressing “utter shock that we would have the nerve to charge for parking after all these years. This last time, it was $10, and patrons could still park for free in the lots further from the venues if they didn’t want to pay.”
Staudinger expressed similar bemusement, measured with her own battle-tested experience. “You can never make everyone happy!” she playfully laments.
Boulter concurs, adding, “It can be such a stressful time for our graduates, event planners, families and friends. Before we were allowed to ticket our ceremonies, we had one event where the number of people who showed up was well beyond our capacity. There was no way I was about to turn people away from seeing someone graduate, so we just opened up all our floors to standing room only! We set a record that day for the amount of people we had in our theaters, and it was that day we decided that we would never not ticket a graduation ceremony!”
The Pressure Is Off for Some INTIX Members
Finally, we interviewed some INTIX professionals who didn’t have to worry about ticketing graduations at all for numerous reasons. One example is Kacy Woody, Box Office Manager for High Point Theatre in North Carolina. She recalls, “We just had two smaller charter schools graduate at our venue. Both chose to be un-ticketed since they had fewer than 50 graduates.”
Jamie Bouse, Manager of the Campus Box Office for Bucknell University, notes, “Our campus box office does not ticket for graduation. Every graduate receives five hard tickets if the event is moved inside. Otherwise, it is open seating outside.”
Tracy Rae Noll
Finally, Tracy Rae Noll, Director of Sales & Development Services for Penn State University, is absolutely overjoyed ticketing commencements are not part of her job description: “Thank the Lord I don’t have to ticket graduations! The ones we hold in our building are for our college and the law school, and both are smaller groups. So, there is no need to ticket!”
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