Help Save Our Venues and Support Our Performers!

Hi everyone, 

Central Tickets needs your help!

What are we trying to achieve? 

We want to raise funds to help support the venues and event organisers who make shows available to our members and we need your help!

As you likely know, COVID-19 has been devastating for theatres and event organisers.   Many venues have fallen through the cracks and aren’t able to secure funding to help them through this incredibly difficult time.  Some of them are faced with the heart-breaking possibility of closing for good.

Since 2017, these same venues have welcomed our members to thousands of great events.  Even throughout lock-down so many of them have selflessly provided free online productions, to keep you all entertained and engaged with theatre.  

We’re hoping that you’ll join us in showing these venues how much we value their contribution to our lives, by making a donation to support them and show them how much we appreciate what they offer us.

Why is this so important?

Despite the fact that indoor performances can begin again from August 15th, the reality is that the social distancing measures mean it won’t make economic sense for many of London’s venues to return until we reach Stage 5 of the Culture Minister’s plan for the Arts.  

A report written by OffWestEnd estimates that a total loss of income over the course of six months (post lockdown) will equal a staggering £7.6m for the 100 venues it has included within its report, should they stage work at reduced capacity levels of 50%.  That figure is in addition to the £13.3m already lost by those venues during March to September.

Central Tickets works with a large variety of different types of events, above and beyond theatre, including comedy, movies, classical music, talks and cabaret.  Many of these have fallen through the cracks in terms of funding being made available to them.  So many great event organisers trust our members to attend their events – most of you will know it’s not uncommon to see 80+ listings on the site for you to choose from.   

These venues and event organisers need our support.   They’ve been so incredibly generous to provide so many events to our members over the years and if we’re able to help make sure that they pull through to eventually offer more opportunities to our members, we should.

We’ve always said that our lovely group of members appreciate the importance of giving something back. We ask you to please consider making a donation or choosing from one of the rewards (there’s a very cool t-shirt).    Every little helps and anything you can spare is gratefully appreciated.  

Our Story

As you’ll likely know already, we are a seat-filling agency based in London.  We provide a seat-filling service for event organisers in London, and our members attend those events for a nominal admin fee.

We began in 2017 as a bedroom business on a shoe-string budget and we’re still a fairly small team.  We’ve been very fortunate in that we’ve grown a really lovely group of members and a steady number of clients who trust us to work with their events.

How COVID-19 has impacted us

Our business, like many others as been greatly impacted by COVID-19.  We’ve not earned any income since Feb and had a great deal of refunds for forthcoming events to make in the weeks that followed the lock-down announcement in March.

It’s been a challenging time, and we’ve dealt with it by focusing on our members and providing good customer service.  Pairing back, cutting costs where we can and making use of the extra time to focus on development and platform upgrades to improve things for our members.   We’ve made a number of exciting improvements to our site that we’re sure you’ll be happy to see, once we begin listing events again.

Despite the fact we've not earned anything, we've decided against fund raising for ourselves.  We'll wait it out and we don't have the running overheads of a venue who are supporting larger teams and all of the fixed running costs associated with operating a theatrical space. They've been hit harder and for that reason, we're focusing on them.

You’ll likely have seen that Hartmut’s been working with producers and scouring the internet to find you different online shows that you can watch for free.  To date, he’s found over 110 different shows which he’s posted in our blog.

If you’ve been watching the shows and enjoyed them, please do consider making a donation for what you might have paid to watch one at the Cinema.  If every member were to do that, the impact would be considerable. 

How will the money be spent?

 Everything we raise will be shared amongst the venues who regularly make events available to our members.

 We’ve given a lot of thought about how to approach this fairly/proportionally and we’ve decided that the best way to allocate the funds is to divide the sum of money raised by the number of tickets booked by our members over the last two years and give the money to the people who allocated them.

That way, the people who have provided the most opportunity for Central Tickets members, will benefit the most.

We will not take any of the money raised for ourselves or Central Tickets. 

Rewards

You can make a donation to help support the venues, or you can choose from our selection of rewards which are shown to the right!