This fall, Wake forest was excited to welcome a small number of fans back into the stands so they reached out to us to build an app based ticket lottery. Building off of our multi-year experience running ticket lotteries for Vilinova basketball, we added even more functionality and flexibility to make realtime attendance adjustments easy as pie.
"In a time where stadium capacity is ever-changing, FanMaker has developed a lottery system that allows us to maximize our student attendance through a fair and equitable ticket allocation process. The FanMaker team has continually provided updates to the software to ensure we can adapt to the many new and unique circumstances we face on a weekly basis - including the ability to service groups or individuals."
- Rhett Hobart, Associate Athletic Director @ Wake Forest
Groups
We've introduced the ability for fans to enter ticket lotteries as a group, in additional to support for individuals. This is great for fans and a must have for contact tracing. Group sizes that can be enabled on a per event basis are 2s, 3s, or 4s. Fans invite friends through the app to build their group while admins can watch things play out via a realtime dashboard.
When it comes time to draw, you can select how many single winners and/or an alotment for each enabled group size (example 100 singles, 20 pairs, and 10 groups of 4). Groups are weighted by their combined loyalty points and random winners are drawn by the system, sending push notifications and statuses to all that entered - all with the press of one button.
"The way in which this system has been designed, we are able to adjust our student capacity number all the way up until the time lottery is drawn during game week, which ensures we can allocate as many seats as possible each week."
- Rhett Hobart, Associate Athletic Director @ Wake Forest
Groups of Various Sizes
We've even built the ability to award tickets to groups of various sizes. Prompted by Wake Forest ESPN College Game Day drive in watch parties. Winning groups just had to fit in one car.
Access Control
After a draw, winners of each lottery are downloaded and tickets can be generated in your traditional ticketing system. However, Wake Forest worked with us to utilize the digtial Screamin' Demon Rewards card for easy access to the drive-in events. Making the entire process live in the mobile app, something the fans greatly appreciated.
Rewarding the Best Fans
Those fans that lose a ticket lottery can be automatically awarded consolation points and often earn watch points for watching the game on TV. For those fans that win but don't you utilize their tickets, the system can automatically penalize their accounts with a point deduction, even ban them from entering lotteries in the future. All ways to make sure your biggest fans get tickets.
"By incorporating this lottery into our existing Screamin' Demon Rewards program, we are able to not only reward those winners for attending, but we are able to penalize students who win a ticket and do not attend, so that we ensure that these limited tickets are being awarded to students who will use them. "
- Rhett Hobart, Associate Athletic Director @ Wake Forest
Setup
To help our clients during this time, individual and group lotteries are available unlimited and free of charge. Just reach out to make sure your app is updated prior to running your first lottery. Setup is a breeze, but we'll be happy to walk you through all the options, please email help@fanmaker.com to get started.
