Printing the Winning Tickets

Season ticket holders at East Carolina University (ECU) used to get a lot more mail at the start of football season. Their tickets for Pirate home games would come in one mailing, their parking passes in another, then their Pirate Club membership cards in a third. It was up to the fans to keep them all straight.

Three years ago, the ECU athletic ticket office came up with a crazy idea: what if everything was combined into one personalized book? It would require lots of coordination and attention to detail to match all the elements for each recipient, but what a boon it would be for fans.

So the ticket office approached ECU Printing & Graphics with its complicated plan. Was it possible?

The 31-employee print and mail operation took the challenge. After months of planning, printing, hand collating and binding, the in-plant completed 6,500 ticket books in 2011. Fans were ecstatic. The in-plant was a hero at the 27,400-student Greenville, N.C., university. The shop has been producing the ticket book ever since.

This year, after winning a Gold award for the book in the In-Print contest, ECU Printing & Graphics was delighted to learn that its work had been honored with an even more distinguished award: Best of Show out of all the digitally printed pieces. Watch the video showing ECU being picked as winner here:

"They were excited," remarks Ann Weingartz, director of University Printing & Graphics. "This is one of our premier pieces."

This year the in-plant produced 5,138 of the books, in a range of different sizes depending on how many season tickets each recipient ordered. Overall, 27,000 ticket sheets were printed, six tickets to a sheet, using both offset and digital printing. Merging those personalized tickets with the parking passes and Pirate Club membership cards—and not mixing any of them up—was the real challenge.

"The only way of putting it together is by hand," notes Weingartz. "It is very complex. You can't just take one off of each stack."

Every employee in the shop was involved in a process that took more than three months and utilized various printing processes and finishing work done by two outside providers.

"They stepped up to the challenge," Weingartz praises her staff.

Putting it All Together

The book was designed by Graphics Manager Earlene Mills. Proofs and plates were produced by Nikki Teel, using an Epson proofer and an Agfa Avalon CTP device. The cover of the spiral-bound book was printed on the in-plant's two-color, 20x29˝ Heidelberg Speedmaster press, operated by Production Manager Mike Robinson.

Because 2013 was the 50th anniversary of ECU's Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium, the 50th anniversary logo on the cover was given a 3D digital embossing effect using a Scodix Sense UV press. The in-plant enlisted local vendor AccuLink to provide this service. The inside front cover as well as the back cover feature archival photos of the stadium over the years.

The first page in the book is a letter to fans followed by sheets of season tickets. Each ticket features a photo of a different coach from over the years. The tickets were printed on the Speedmaster. Then they were brought to the North Carolina Prison Industries in-plant where they were perforated and foil stamped. Finally, they were returned to the in-plant to be personalized with the fan's name, seat number and a bar code using a Xerox iGen4, run by Allen Vervisch.

Next in the book is a map of the athletic area showing parking locations. This is followed by parking passes for each game. These were also printed on the Speedmaster, perfed and foil stamped outside, and then personalized on the iGen4.

The next page is an offset-printed letter from the Pirate Club's executive director, with the fan's club ID card glued to the sheet. Hospitality cards, printed on the iGen4, follow this, with the number of cards varying depending on each fan's donation level. An offset-printed coupon page follows this, and then a sheet of foil-stamped commemorative tickets.

This year the project experienced an early setback when new athletic and marketing directors decided to overhaul the book.

"There were a couple pages we had already printed," Weingartz says. This caused some delays, she adds, but "we were able to get it done. It was very tight."

Coordinating the printing of these various elements, and keeping them all in order by Pirate Club ID number was certainly a challenge, but equally complex was the job of assembling the individual books. To help employees get the right pieces in each one, information was printed along the inside edge of each page showing the fan's ID number and how many of each item they should have in their book. Some books, Weingartz says, included 20 sheets of tickets.

Once books were assembled, they were coil bound using an Akiles Finish@Coil E1 electric coil inserter. Then they were packed and shipped via UPS to eager fans.

"We're very excited…to be able to say that the tickets at ECU are done internally and that we can be a part of making it happen," says Weingartz. "My staff is what makes it happen. They're just very dedicated to East Carolina."