Arkansas State University’s main campus is home to the six major entertainment facilities on its primary campus in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The University has one of the most diverse entertainment facility operations in the country, boasting a 31,000 seat Indian Stadium for their collegiate football activities, a Convocation Center that houses an 11,000 seat arena for basketball that can be reconfigured to a 2,800 seat arena/theatre for concerts and live stage performances, and a 2,500 seat Baseball complex.

Their performing arts activities take place in the Fowler Center, which houses multiple facilities including the 1,000 seat Riceland Music Hall, the 350 seat ASU Drama Theatre and an experimental flexible 100 to 250 seat Black Box theatre. All told, their centralized box office ticketing operation sells more than 250,000 tickets per year for Athletics, campus events and departmental performing arts activities, generating more than $2 million annually for the University.

One of the major challenges of having such a broad and diverse performing arts operation is being able to manage the ticketing and financial controls easily and efficiently for all of the many constituent groups on campus. For years the operation functioned using a non-integrated DOS-based solution that caused enormous strain on the disparate box office operations throughout campus.

The challenge their centralized box office ticketing operation faced was their ability to manage all of the many facilities in a flexible manner and their ability to provide financial and sales/marketing-based reporting that would allow University management to truly understand, in real-time mode, the impact of sales on departmental activities on a day-to-day basis.

In the fall of 1999, the University created a Request for Proposal to find a ticketing solution that would address their campus-wide needs on a long-term basis. In the summer of 2000, Choice Ticketing Systems was installed as the University’s solution to address the challenge. From the moment the system was installed, the Choice solution immediately addressed their needs.

The training of the staff was extremely effective and the system was very easy to use, both for their staff, but most importantly, for their students who worked in the ticket operation. One of the most positive impacts has been the use of Choice Ticketing’s integrated, real-time internet ticketing module, Choice.Net. Online ticket sales have been much larger than anticipated, upwards of 30% of their inventory, and the University is now easily selling tickets to customers from Coast to Coast. In fact, since Choice was brought on, the ticket office has handled the only football sell-out in school history, as well as the first sell-out in 20 years of its 11,000 seat basketball arena, in a matter of an 18-hour period, when the Lady Indians played against their cross-state rival, the University of Arkansas Lady Razorbacks.

Arkansas State Unversity

"Besides providing a great system that allows me to effectively manage events in our 6 major campus facilities, the personal treatment I receive from Choice is excellent. "