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Taylor – I appreciate the attention from the dev team and the update you provided on 10/23/17, but that update actually does NOT address the original issue raised by Valerie Costa. You’ve marked this issue as “Completed”, but it needs to still be active because the original problem has still not been solved.

It sounds like Valerie misunderstood the “Ticket level limit” field as the limit for total tickets sold, rather than tickets sold for just that single level. If an event is only using a single ticket level, then that is effectively the case, but for events that use multiple ticket levels, Valerie’s original problem still exists: NationBuilder does not display the total number of TICKETS sold and provide the ability to shut down sales so a limit is not exceeded. Instead, the limit is on RSVPs, which are not a remotely accurate proxy.

Case in point: My campaign has a fundraiser coming up, in a theater with 96 seats (and a fire code to match). We have 96 tickets to sell, and have no leeway to oversell; the number of seats is a hard limit. We have seven ticket packages available to our supporters: some packages come with one ticket, other packages come with two tickets. Many people are buying two-ticket packages, but NB counts it as one package, not two tickets, even though it knows how many tickets are in that package. Many people are even buying multiple two-ticket packages… and all of that gets counted as a single RSVP. We have currently sold 76 tickets but only have 48 RSVPs. I have the “Maximum Capacity” set to 96, but at the current rate, that’s going to wind up with 157 tickets for our 96 seats! That’s an obvious problem.

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To add insult to injury, even though NationBuilder tracks actual tickets sold (http://nationbuilder.com/event_ticket_level_variables), it doesn’t make that number accessible to the user anywhere, so I have to go through and manually count every time I want to know how many tickets have been sold. We’re selling tickets very rapidly this week, which means I have to stay chained to my computer and refresh the RSVP page every few minutes to see if there have been any changes. If the number has changed, then I have to re-count the tickets sold all over again. I’m going to have to keep doing this until we get close to 96, then hope the timing works out perfectly for me to shut sales down when we’re right ON 96, without underselling or overselling.

Because our supporters are purchasing each of our seven ticket packages fairly evenly, and because I don’t care which packages are sold as long as we sell exactly 96 tickets, I don’t want to set an arbitrary limit on sales for a specific ticket level. I’m glad to see this functionality has been recently fixed, but it only achieves one piece of a much larger goal; it is not itself a total solution.

I just got off the phone with a helpful support tech, who confirmed that everything I’ve stated above is accurate, and I’m not overlooking anything.

As the events director for my campaign, knowing whether or not this will be fixed in the very near future will change the strategy I use with my team when planning ticketed events. If the current situation is going to stay in place for very long, then we will no longer be able to hold events with a limited number of tickets or fire capacity because NB makes it impossible to manage. If the situation will be fixed in the near-term, then I can tell my team to proceed with planning limited-capacity events for later in the winter; because fundraisers and large events take as much as 4-8 weeks of advance planning, I don’t want to tell my team to needlessly do no work if the NB issue will be fixed by the time we get to ticket sales for the event.

ACTION ITEMS:
Please re-open this issue, consolidate it with ( http://nationbuilder.com/lauren_rowse/count_tickets_that_account_for_more_than_one_ticket_purchase_towards_rsvp_count/ ) since they go hand-in-hand, and provide an update on the status toward fixing it. Thanks!

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Thank you Christopher – Absolutely understand. We are currently iterating on events and this is really helpful feedback. At the moment we do not have a timeline on this specific fix.

What’s the status on this? If we cannot lock-out ticket sales automatically, we will not be able to use NB for ticket sales again. Indeed, we will probably have to switch to another CM platform entirely.

Just wondered if there is a timeline on this issue. It would be especially useful not only to set limits on tickets but different limits for different tickets. Without some way to do this (given the limitations of venues) I can’t use this function for my nation.

My venues don’t have limitless capacity. The inability to limit ticket sales makes it impossible for me to use NB for ticket selling. This should surely have been part of the design of this function