Last summer, the AMS began discussions with the online ticketing platform Bounce, with the hope of streamlining club operations and easing logistical challenges.
Founded by Queen’s alumni Sean Monteiro and Francesco Virga, Sci ’20, Bounce is an online ticketing platform already successfully partnered with campus organizations across North America. Now, the co-founders are going back to their Tricolour roots, hoping to form a solid partnership with their alma mater.
According to Monteiro, the partnership would support students with time-management through manually compiling information and payments and simplify club engagement through a campus-gated experience.
While the partnership is in its early stages, Monteiro says he believes once it’s complete, it will help build “a world class campus experience.” The decision by the AMS to work toward a partnership with Bounce was largely influenced by their connection to Queen’s, as two former engineering students.
“When we work with Bounce, they [can] understand our demographic,” AMS President Owen Rocchi said in an interview with The Journal. The AMS sees Bounce as particularly useful for event sanctioning, ensuring clubs communicate their plans, assess risks, and navigate marketing logistics effectively.
Student-run clubs often manage several systems for payments, promotions, and tickets, which, according to Monteiro, leads to inefficiencies and unnecessary security risks. By centralizing event administration and managing marketing, registrations, and ticket sales in one location, Bounce simplifies this process. For example, clubs can use Bounce as a hub to measure attendance, sell tickets, and send reminders.
Both Bounce and the AMS confirm their partnership is in its early stages, and they don’t yet have a clear picture of what it will look like. Despite the current ambiguity, the AMS’s first goal of the partnership is to improve internal processes across the board for ratified clubs.
“We’ve done some research into what integrating event sanctioning would look like to make that an easier process, so it really comes down to what we’re able to agree on in the agreement,” Rocchi said.
From a business and logistical standpoint, a second goal of the AMS is to centrally provide a system that all clubs can use, free of charge. To accomplish this, one of the AMS’s first priorities is to assess what costs the student-funded Society would have to take on, Rocchi said.
Bounce’s statement to The Journal indicates past experiences working with other organizations—including clubs at Western—have proven to be successful.
“We’ve seen entire campuses benefit from a 37 per cent increase in event group attendance and a 16 per cent increase in activities hosted per club,” Monteiro said.
Monteiro says the use of Bounce would see an even greater impact on the individual club level through positive changes to turnout and funding. Through the Bounce platform, the co-founders believe students will benefit from professional grade marketing and communication.
“[AMS ratified clubs can expect to see] a 42 per cent increase in their attendance and a 52 per cent increase in proceeds from campus events,” Monteiro said.
In an e-mail sent to ratified clubs at the beginning of February, club executives were told Bounce is the official event hosting and community management platform for the AMS and all AMS clubs and societies are to use Bounce for event RSVPs and ticketing, instead of other services like INTERAC e-Transfer or EventBrite. However, when asked to confirm this, the AMS said the AMS’s collaboration with Bounce is not a mandate.
According to the AMS’s Director of Communications Katarina Bojic, the e-mail was sent by the Clubs Commission, which exists under the Vice-President (University Affairs) portfolio, on behalf of Bounce who had initially sent the AMS an introduction. Bojic confirmed it’s not mandatory for ratified clubs to use Bounce, rather the Society encourages clubs to register for the platform.
“I know people are scared of it becoming mandatory and there’s a lot of question marks, but I do see this is a huge opportunity for growth, and I think it starts a really good conversation as to what can the AMS do for clubs,” Rocchi said.
According to Rocchi, the prospective partnership aims to uphold club autonomy—a core AMS value—while streamlining operations.
While the timeline and further details for the partnership haven’t been disclosed, the AMS implores students and those affiliated with any club to reach out to an AMS executive via e-mail if they would like to see anything included in the potential partnership. Alternatively, students can ask questions at Assembly, with the next one taking place March 3.
“This [partnership is] something we’re taking a step on because we’ve listened to students, so we’ll need to ensure we remain listening to ensure we’re aligned with student needs every step of the way,” Rocchi said.
Tags
AMS, Bounce, clubs, Student life
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