At I.M.P. It’s "Friends with Benefits" for Fans "Fringe! Benefits" for Employees

I.M.P. owns and manages the world renown entertainment venues 9:30 Club, Merriweather Post Pavilion, The Lincoln Theatre and The Anthem and presents shows at a variety of other venues. While each of their venues is special, the world-famous 9:30 Club, located in Washington, D.C., is recognized as the most attended music club of its size in the world and has received dozens of top club awards from Billboard, Rolling Stone and Pollstar.

Challenge

Always an innovative organization, I.M.P. wanted to reward its loyal and passionate customers who have contributed so much to the company’s success. In addition, they wanted to generate a deeper understanding of those fans to create targeted marketing campaigns. I.M.P. also wanted its program to be tied to each part of the fan experience (buying a ticket, attending a show and buying food, drink and merchandise) to better analyze data that would help the company make better informed decisions about its business.

“We presented the LoyaltyMatch team with quite a challenge because of the many elements that we wanted woven into the system, starting with ticketing and going through the entire concert experience, including social media and point of sale transactions for both food & beverage and merchandise. The result speaks for itself. LoyaltyMatch definitely stepped up.” -- Donna Westmoreland, chief operating officer, I.M.P.

Solution

To provide the features required, we adapted our cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to allow the integration of point-of-sale transactions for food and beverage from three point-of-sale vendors - POSitouch, Lavu and Bypass. Also integrated was social media, including Twitter and Facebook interactions, and mobile check-ins at the club using the InVenue mobile app developed and built by LoyaltyMatch. In addition, the Friends with Benefits program was then linked with the web-based ticketing company Ticketfly(and recently Ticketmaster as well) making LoyaltyMatch the first loyalty program platform to support a ticketing company. Merchandise sales are tallied and points awarded to the loyalty program members using a LoyaltyMatch designed app.

You can investigate Friends with Benefits further at friends.930.com .

Result

Following the successful launch of Friends with Benefits, the program members have stated emphatically that they feel a closer connection to the I.M.P. venues in what is a crowded entertainment market. They have expressed a feeling of pride in being connected to the 9:30 Club and the I.M.P. venues. Six years after the full launch, and with the number of Friends with Benefits program members approaching 35,000, I.M.P. knows that the program has been a great success from a fan viewpoint. Furthermore, the quality of data that they have been able to collect is constantly helping them to make decisions and take actions that increase revenue one fan at a time.

If you would like to know more about how a loyalty program can help you increase revenue, contact us at sales@loyaltymatch.com for for a demo or check out our Venues demo site at Front & Center by LoyaltyMatch.

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Fringe Benefits

I.M.P. has almost 2,000 full and parttime employees. Every day and at every show they display their commitment to customers, the fans, and a dedication to service excellence that makes them the best in the business. For that reason, earlier this year I.M.P. introduced Fringe! Benefits -- a program that rewards employees for their hard work and loyalty. Built on a similar platform to that used for Friends with Benefits, hourly employees are rewarded with points for each hour worked. Those paid a salary are awarded points per pay period. The points can be exchanged for tickets to shows at all I.M.P. venues. I.M.P. believes that every employee is an ambassador for the company. It is important to reward and keep great people. Fringe! Benefits is helping them do it.