From the Executive Corner
by Dave Butler, Paciolan

It was a pleasure to host many of you at the 25th annual PACnet conference last month. I couldn't be more excited about the Paciolan community and the opportunities that we share. It is inspiring to see so many of you at once to learn more about your business and address the future together.

During PACnet, we shared with you some new opportunities surrounding Enablement Plus. We are thrilled to offer new tools to help you sell more tickets, your way. Enablement Plus allows you to select Ticketmaster tools to extend your marketing reach, and sell more tickets. Some of these tools will include:

• Primary auctions and VIP packages
• Links on Ticketmaster.com
• Access to Ticketmaster Email Alerts to tap into the Ticketmaster database

We will continue to uncover more opportunities in the future. With all of these new tools, it continues to be 'your way' as the choice to participate in any of these programs is completely up to you.

We are also very excited to announce that PACnet 09 will be held at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel & Spa from February 22 – 25, 2009. This newly renovated hotel & spa is located in the heart of Orange County at Fashion Island in beautiful Newport Beach.

We are extremely pleased to beta the v6.84 release for the general admissions market. This beta release features several enhancements that our museums and attractions clients have requested including per ticket fees by price category, per order fees by item, and much more. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Pittsburgh Zoo are currently live on v6.84 and will be shortly joined by other beta clients Pacific Science Center and the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

Football Renewals are back in full swing with over 45 universities participating in the Paciolan Green Partnership program. This program leverages the Internet to save universities time and money by reducing paper-based applications while also helping the environment. (See article below.)

In Major League Baseball news, the New York Mets set a team record for ticket sales, surpassing the 2 million mark, by February 22nd, a 10 percent lift over last season. What's more, the Mets sold out two Billy Joel concerts, for "The Last Play at Shea" marking the final concert at Shea Stadium. In fact, the first onsale was the fastest concert sellout in Shea's 44-year history when more than 50,000 tickets were sold.

As always, I encourage you to contact me or any member of the Paciolan team with questions or comments about the business. Our goal is to best serve you by providing you with products and services that help you manage your business and keep your customers for life.

Sincerely,

Dave

Football Season Renewals Go Green
by James Kim, Paciolan

Many of us don’t realize that paper production/usage creates astronomical waste and is detrimental to the environment. According to CU Recycling, recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees, two barrels of oil (enough to run an average car for 1,260 miles), 4,100 kilowatts of energy (enough power for the average home for six months), 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space and 60 pounds of air pollution.

In an effort to help reduce environmental waste and energy, the college athletic community started 2008 “in the green” by adopting the Green Partnership program. The program was established by Paciolan to help educate and drive their client community into implementing environmental friendly business practices while increasing their business efficiency. In fact, Paciolan has already begun this process by recycling used goods and being energy efficient. A few examples include recycling paper goods, cans and bottles and issuing coffee mugs to reduce paper cup usage.

To kick off the Green Partnership program, online football renewals and other environmental friendly tactics were heavily promoted by the schools to help reduce printing and mailing of expensive paper renewal applications. To date, over 45 schools have collectively contributed to help saving the environment while increasing their bottom line by:

• Implementing an online early renewal period (ranging from one to three weeks) before printing and mailing paper applications to accounts that have not yet renewed
• Not mailing heavy instructional and FAQ documentation along with the paper applications, but rather posting them online
• Communicating renewal instructions via email and directing their customers online
• Redesigning their paper applications to encourage online renewals and printing them on recycled paper

With about 3 months remaining in the football season renewal schedule, Paciolan and their client community are working together to help reduce environmental waste. Upon realization of successful online renewal campaigns, other organizations and other departments within the college athletic organizations are following suit. A few of the performing arts organizations are starting to push online season subscription renewals. Some of the schools are now sending online newsletters and invoices to their donors instead of printing and sending costly paper versions. These types of efforts are not only helping the environment, but helping to fight rising business costs.

With the upcoming basketball season renewals in a few months, Paciolan hopes to see similar results, reducing global waste and costs. If you would like to help your organization go green, please contact your Client Partner.

One Million Dollars in Three Days – UGA Sets a Record for Online Donations
by James Kim, Paciolan

University of Georgia’s William C. Hartman Jr. Foundation realized significant gains in February when they decided to push their donations online. The move paid off when they sent personalized emails to their donors on Friday reminding them of their upcoming donation deadline and generated over one million dollars in online donations the following business day.

“Our donation deadline was 7 days away when we sent the email and we were very eager to see the results. We didn’t believe it at first so we literally had to double check the figures to make sure that the data was correct,” said Carolyn Center, UGA’s Director of Development. “We were amazed that one email generated such a huge response – approximately $1.2 million in online donations, 45% open rate and over 54% response rate.”

One item that was quite different from the previous emails was personalization. For this email campaign, donors were provided with their individual:

• Donor ranking
• Annual donation commitment
• Year to date donation amount

It provided the donors a real-time snapshot of their financial standings a few days before their donation deadline, prompting them to act. In addition to their personalized information, UGA offered online donors a chance to win two sideline passes to a home football game or an autographed book by the head football coach.

With such a high response rate, more time was freed up for UGA’s development staff to procure new donor contributions instead of chasing down existing accounts.

“We were able to easily integrate our tFund data into PACMail and send off our emails without any problems. We plan on leveraging these advanced features to raise the bar of our donor communications and promotions,” stated Carolyn Center. In fact, UGA is already taking a creative approach to increasing their open and response rates of their monthly electronic donor newsletters. In their last newsletter, donors were encouraged to click on any of the featured articles to be entered in a drawing for a men’s basketball VIP package or courtside seat to the final home game. A list was then generated out of PACMail targeting donors who responded to the email. With this effort, UGA saw a 13% increase in their open rates.

PACnet Wrap Up
by Craig Ricks, Paciolan

PACnet 08 was our most heavily attended community conference ever. It was truly a special community event with over 140 organizations in attendance and over 50 community members participating on panels and delivering presentations. The power of the community was never more evident than this 25th anniversary community conference as your peers and friends connected and collaborated on ticketing, fund development and marketing topics.

If you or other members of your organization were unable to attend or simply missed an event, please log in to PSO to download copies of all presentations and watch recordings of the keynote addresses. By visiting PSO your will find:

• PACnet content by session in PowerPoint format
• Monday's Keynote Session Video Link featuring Dave Butler of Paciolan and Mike McGee of Ticketmaster
• Tuesday's Keynote Session Video Link featuring Don Peppers of Peppers & Rogers Group
• Wednesday's Keynote Session Video Link featuring Sean Moriarty of Ticketmaster
• Video Highlights from the Heroes Awards Luncheon
• Candid Interviews

How to Access the PSO

1. Log on to PSO
2. Enter you username and password
3. Click on the Documentation button
4. Click on the PACnet Content Link from the Resource column
5. Download PPT files and watch the videos!

PACnet is truly about you and sets the tone for the entire year. We appreciate your participation and are excited about our partnership and the opportunities to strengthen the Paciolan community. Additionally, we will continue to attend and support upcoming industry events including CABMA/NACDA, IAAM, ALSD and Summer INTIX and look forward to seeing many of you at these events. What’s more, we are excited to announce that PACnet 09 will be held at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel & Spa from February 22 – 25, 2009.

To continue the PACnet experience, you are invited to participate in discussion and interactions with the Paciolan community online via our community forums.

Community Forum Re-launch with Exciting New Features
by Brenda Ramsay, Paciolan

The Community Forums were introduced in 2005 to provide Paciolan clients with a safe, convenient, 24/7 online environment to share ideas, post questions, brainstorm solutions and deepen relationships with colleagues. The forums are exclusively for Paciolan clients and are moderated by your peers.

We are currently revitalizing the forums with exciting beneficial features – helping you maximize this useful tool. The latest additions range from tagging and subscriptions to accepted solutions with plans to implement more features soon. All of these features have been designed to make the community forums more user friendly and helpful for you. Some of these features include:

New features:

• Subscriptions to boards and threads
• Tagging
• Accepted Solutions
• Bookmark a post
• RSS feed to threads
• Kudos rankings and bonus points
• Add colleagues as your friends
• Polls
• Message Search
• Upload & Share Video

Subscriptions to Boards and Threads
Every community member who has logged onto the forums can subscribe to boards by market and product category. Your subscription will allow you to receive an email each time a colleague posts a message or replies to a thread. This is much like the list server mechanism that many of you are familiar with. RSS feed subscriptions are also available.

Tag! You’re it.
In the right hand column of the forums, you’ll see a new box labeled ‘Tagging’ with associated keywords below it. These keywords are tags that an author has assigned to a particular message. Clicking on a tag displays a screen listing all messages that include the tag. This provides you with a quick sense of the hot topics in the community, and allows you to quickly zero in on messages about a specific topic.

And of course you’ll still be able to:

• Upload Attachments
• Post questions
• Brainstorm ideas to help your business
• Share best practices
• Network with other Paciolan clients
• Locate colleagues
• Share product tips
• Post job openings
• Seek out job opportunities

We will continue to share with you more details surrounding features and benefits of the community forums in the future and invite you to preview these new features online.

Learning Center Series
by Jason Evans, Paciolan

Exciting News! As Spring 2008 nears, the Learning Center Series (LCS) benchmarks its second anniversary. Thank you for making this weekly event blossom with success!

Due to your continued positive support, the Learning Center Series is thriving. As of fall 2007, the Learning Center Series initiated the version 6.9 Enhancements and Market Overview sessions. These sessions proved monumental attendance over the few months and allowed Paciolan Staff to communicate existing functionality as well as the new features of version 6.9 to you, our customer.

These sessions give you the knowledge you need to:

• Increase your understanding of Paciolan functionality
• Implement new features
• Gain tricks, tips and tools
• Improve patron management and relationships
• Learn and apply industry best practices

To participate in any LCS session, simply register online via the Community Portal and preview upcoming events.

If you missed any of the previous LCS sessions, you will find them archived on the PSO site. To access these archives, simply follow these steps:

• Log into PSO.
• Click the Documentation link. The Documentation Main Page displays.
• Click on Learning Center Series Archive link