Cobbossee Ice Fishing Derby

The Cobbossee Ice Fishing Derby is an annual event held on Cobbossee Lake in Winthrop, Maine. It is put on by three partnering organizations: Friends of the Cobbossee WatershedProject Cony Graduation, and the YMCA Camp of Maine

An ice fishing derby is a fishing competition on a frozen lake; the winner is the angler who catches the biggest fish in different categories. Throughout the day, anglers spread out across Cobbossee Lake to fish, and then bring in their catches at the end of the afternoon. This year, the Ice Fishing Derby had 622 contestants. They used TicketSignup to sell tickets and collect donations for the 2022 event, which was held on March 5. 


Successes from the 2022 event included:

Upselling Tickets through Combo Tickets
Increasing donations with integrated donation ask
Easy attendee management with ticket holder info

TicketSignup’s free and purpose-built ticket platform has a number of flexible features that accommodated the unique needs of the Cobbossee Ice Fishing Derby. From dynamic reports to automated price changes, using TicketSignup for ticket sales helped the three organizations in charge of the event save time and deliver a great event to their supporters.

Combo Tickets

The Ice Fishing Derby used TicketSignup’s Combo Tickets feature to upsell additional tickets. They wanted to be able to charge a set price of $30 for a family ticket (one adult and unlimited children), and then allow families to add on an additional adult ticket for free if they needed it. For the purpose of the contest, the Ice Fishing Derby also needed to make sure they collected the name and contact information for all participants. 

They created three tickets: a Family Entry ticket, which was priced to include one adult and two children; an Under 16 ticket, which was priced at $0; and an Additional Adult ticket, also at a $0 price. Then they used Combo Tickets in their event dashboard to limit the Under 16 ticket and the Additional Adult ticket to only be available with the purchase of at least one Family Ticket. The benefit of doing it this way is that the Ice Fishing Derby collected participant information for each individual ticket, so they had the name of every participant in the derby. 

Donations in Purchase Path

TicketSignup makes it easy to collect donations in the ticket purchase path and on the event website. The Ice Fishing Derby included messaging in their donation step that encouraged participants to make an additional donation above and beyond their registration fee, and explained where that money would go.

Since the event was a partnership between three groups, this was a great way to raise additional funds for each of those organizations. Most of the donations they received were small ($5 or $10), which correlated with the relatively low ticket price of the event, but those small donations added up and the Ice Fishing Derby collected over $500 in additional donations by the end of the event.

Information Collection 

Typically, ticket events don’t need to collect much (if any) information from their attendees. This is a key difference between registration and ticketing. However, some events, like the Ice Fishing Derby, need to make sure that they collect the names, emails, and phone numbers of every single person participating in the contest. TicketSignup has flexible information collection options that allowed them to do this online during ticket purchase, rather than in person on the day of the event.

By default, TicketSignup tickets only require the information of the ticket purchaser (the person paying at checkout). The Ice Fishing Derby turned on the option that required the ticket purchaser to fill in the information of the person associated with each ticket they were buying. The Ice Fishing Derby was able to select which fields they wanted to require:

These fields showed in ticket purchase: 

The ticketholder information showed in the Ice Fishing Derby’s reports, which made managing the derby and determining the results much easier on event day.


Summary


The Cobbossee Ice Fishing Derby is a unique community event. TicketSignup’s ticket platform had the free and flexible tools to create a streamlined ticket purchase process and collect donations, allowing the Derby to sell more tickets and raise more money.

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