Jennifer Rodgers
Director of Ticket Operations
TD Garden, Boston
When Jennifer Rodgers was a student at the University of Rhode Island studying for a degree in public relations, little did she realize her part-time job working in the campus box office would be the beginning of a stellar career in the industry.
“You don’t go to college to be a ticketing professional,” she said.
When a ticketing position opened at TD Garden, Rodgers got hired and hasn’t looked back. Since she joined the venue’s ticketing operations in 2005, Rodgers has held just about every box office position at the venue. She has been in her current role as director of ticket operations for about five years.
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“For me, one of the biggest successes I attribute to my position is having the ability to be in the box office as long as I have and keeping up with analogs and digital,” Rodgers explained. “I evaluate our structure time and again to support changes.”
Rodgers attributes her success in ticketing to staying on top of things that are thrown her way in an arbitrary environment.
“There’s nothing we’re not prepared to handle,” she said. “I consider it more about an opportunity to learn something new, and that’s the beauty of ticketing; it is always challenging but also welcoming.”
With the pandemic challenges, she said it was necessary for everyone to take a back seat to see what the long-term impacts would be.
“We focused on addressing the needs of our clients to make sure they were taken care of,” she said. “Of course, we want people to come back time and again, so doing right by the client, putting a plan in place, executing this and following industry standards was the focus. We’re giving people the security that they have something to come back to.”
She added that the nature of ticketing is a challenge for anyone, especially in today’s digital environment.
“I have teenage children, so for them everything is digital,” Rodgers said. “But my parents have flip phones and think digital tickets are crazy. It’s about finding a balance.”
Consequently, Rodgers works to keep up with the latest technology while at the same time trying to make things easier.
“The issues we’re dealing with now are not the same issues we’ll deal with in five or 10 years,” she said. “We can’t foresee what will happen, so we need to stay on our toes and be ready to change; we have to acclimate and not hold on to the past.”
One accomplishment Rodgers is most proud of is the implementation of smart elevators in the last two years. TD Garden worked with Ticketmaster and software vendors to develop the technology, which scans guest tickets at the elevator to automatically take them to the floor where they’re seated. Reserved for TD Garden members, the system also learns guest behaviors to assist with egress and digress.
“We call it feet to street,” Rodgers said. “We want to make their experience as easy as possible.”
