The National Ploughing Championships is the largest multi-day annual event in the Irish calendar, hosting up to 297,000 attendees over three days at a temporary location, including a record 115,500 daily figure in 2022.
It is the highlight of the agricultural industry’s commercial calendar and while there are genuine competitions throughout every day, it is an event that successfully caters for a wide and diverse audience featuring something for everyone including a tented trade village, a food fair, a craft village, livestock displays, forestry education presentations, lifestyle seminars, a motor show, and other industry-related suppliers including financial services, bio-energy and agricultural services.
The Challenge
Our partnership with the National Ploughing Association (NPA) addresses a number of operational challenges
- Staffing and management of access control across 25 entrances;
- Compliance with statutory authority requirements for live reporting;
- Online ticket sales and distribution;
- Partner, Staff, Sponsor, Stakeholder and Exhibitor Ticketing and Access Management;
- Large-scale event management;
- Full digital online and offline ticketing functionality.
The Solution
Future Ticketing and the NPA work together to actively encourage pre-event sales to new and existing customers in order to grow the number of returning customers year-on-year. The first stage of this is to continually ensure the NPA’s complete brand
integrity is protected, with customers being assured that by purchasing on the NPA’s own website, with no redirect to other websites, customer trust is maintained. By ensuring a quick and uncomplicated online purchase journey, which includes Apple and Google payment options, customers can easily transact and purchase tickets online, regardless of a customer’s technical know-how, by following the four-step process.
Working closely with the team at the NPA, Future Ticketing successfully managed the digital-ticketing transformation of the event, increasing online advance ticket sales, reducing on-site cash handling, and significantly increasing sales via mobile devices.
For those who wish not to buy online, customers can purchase tickets at designated onsite ticket booths during the event, purchasing by credit and debit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and cash payments. Customers are provided with a ticket and receipt onsite to enter on the day and to ensure all tickets are scanned at specific entrance locations.
Through the Future Ticketing dashboard, The National Ploughing Championships has access to all of their own customer data, including county and postcode information. This data has many uses and for example, has enabled the traffic management team to plan routes and preempt car numbers from this information. Importantly, and for peace of mind, the revenue generated by ticket sales through the Future Ticketing Platform is sent directly to the National Ploughing Championships bank account on their preferred payment schedule which enables the team to plan and arrange commercial opportunities pre-event and manage their cash flow effectively. The annual event, which is generally held in September each year, takes place on a 600-acre site with 1,700 exhibitors and 400 acres of car-parking spaces. The management of this event includes 25 gates each of which has two entrance points with scanning staff members present. Every five gates are further manned by a Future Ticketing supervisor and a Future Ticketing site manager who oversees the whole event and is based in the event control room for the Championships. The NPA team has the ability to report on live scanning figures by gate to the Gardaí, the event controller and other statutory authorities.
Permission-based access to live scanning data by entrance is available to all statutory authorities to help inform on-the-day event control decisions, which often have to be made in real-time and during the event, especially given the Irish weather in September. Future Ticketing staff manage all on-the-day access control with a total of 55 trained expert members of the team on-site from 0400hrs daily to ensure an optimum experience for all attendees. Access control is managed via 50 weatherproof, robust, superfast laser scanners that can operate via wifi, SIM cards and offline with a failsafe server solution on-site, to ensure contingency in the event of a connectivity outage.
The National Ploughing Association is a great example of a successful migration from physical to digital ticketing. In 2021, tickets were printed and posted to customers but by 2023, all online orders were issued etickets and purchasers were given the option of downloading their tickets to their Apple and Google Wallets. Customers could also download the branded National Ploughing Association Ticketing APP to share tickets with friends and family, providing additional benefits for group bookings. Following the renewed focus on Future Ticketing’s digital ticketing capability, most recently through its Digital Ticketing App, uptake of online sales and digital tickets have surpassed 90% of tickets processed through the system with the vast majority of these purchased on the week of the event.
