All About Argenta
How a County Fair Got Its Ticketing Online in a Day
July 20, 2026
A customer story from The Chief Mason Griffith Foundation, shared with their permission.
The email came in late on a Thursday night. The Gasconade County Fair was coming, the foundation needed to sell tickets online, and what they were asking for didn't exist in our software yet.
Angela Koepke, Director of Daily Operations at The Chief Mason Griffith Foundation, sent it knowing it was a big ask. In her words: "Our organization had an urgent need, and I wasn't even sure if it could be accomplished, let alone in the timeline we needed."
The timeline was that day.
What they actually needed
A county fair isn't one event. It runs across several days, and people buy into it differently. Some want the whole run. Plenty of others want the Saturday, or just the Thursday, and they don't want to pay for days they won't use.
So the foundation needed a season pass covering the full fair, plus a separate pass for each individual day. That part is ordinary enough. The hard part is the gate.
A Wednesday ticket has to work on Wednesday and not on Saturday. A season pass has to work all four days. If every ticket looks the same to whoever is scanning at the entrance, you either wave people through and lose the money, or you slow the line to a crawl while someone squints at a printout.
What they needed was for each ticket to know which days it was good for.
What happened next
Angela's account: "At approximately 7:00 the next morning, I received a personal phone call from Jake. He took the time to fully understand our organization's needs, asked thoughtful questions, and immediately accepted the challenge when I explained that we needed everything completed that same day."
The team built admission windows into event ticketing. Every ticket type can now carry its own admit start and end date, separate from when the ticket goes on sale. A single-day pass admits on that one day. A season pass admits across the whole range. The ticket carries its own rules, so the person at the gate doesn't have to.
The foundation's fair went in with a season pass and a separate pass for each day of the run, each one valid only when it should be. Tickets go out with a QR code, and staff can scan them from a phone at the gate rather than working from a printed list.
"By 4:00 PM that afternoon, the customization was complete, tested, and ready for us to use," Angela wrote. "What seemed impossible the night before had become a reality in less than one business day."
The part that isn't about the software
We should be straight about something: same-day is not our standard turnaround, and we'd be doing you a disservice to imply otherwise. Most requests get scoped, queued, and built on a normal schedule like anywhere else.
What made this one different wasn't heroics. It was that there was nobody in the way. Angela's email reached the person who could say yes. He called her at seven in the morning and asked real questions instead of opening a ticket. The developers who needed to build it heard the actual problem, not a summary of a summary.
That's a structural thing, not a personality thing, and it's the part we'd want any nonprofit to understand about working with a smaller company.
Angela put the contrast plainly: "Before switching to Argenta last year, we spent thousands of dollars on software that came with expensive monthly fees, long wait times for support, and customer service representatives who never seemed to know who we were. Every time we needed help, we had to start over with someone new. There was no relationship and no real understanding of our mission."
And: "With Argenta, you're not just another account number. You're treated like family. You have real people who know your organization, understand your goals, and genuinely want to help you succeed."
Who this helps now
Admission windows aren't a one-off. They're in the product, so any organization running a multi-day event can use them: fairs, festivals, conferences, tournaments, camp sessions, anything where a ticket should work on some days and not others.
If you're running an event like that and currently solving it with wristband colors and a volunteer with a clipboard, that's the problem this fixes.
Start here
If you're weighing up how your events, ticketing, and donor records should fit together, our free Nonprofit Operations Guide covers how the pieces connect.
And our thanks to Angela and The Chief Mason Griffith Foundation, both for trusting us with a hard deadline and for letting us tell the story.
The email came in late on a Thursday night. The Gasconade County Fair was coming, the foundation needed to sell tickets online, and what they were asking for didn't exist in our software yet.
Angela Koepke, Director of Daily Operations at The Chief Mason Griffith Foundation, sent it knowing it was a big ask. In her words: "Our organization had an urgent need, and I wasn't even sure if it could be accomplished, let alone in the timeline we needed."
The timeline was that day.
What they actually needed
A county fair isn't one event. It runs across several days, and people buy into it differently. Some want the whole run. Plenty of others want the Saturday, or just the Thursday, and they don't want to pay for days they won't use.
So the foundation needed a season pass covering the full fair, plus a separate pass for each individual day. That part is ordinary enough. The hard part is the gate.
A Wednesday ticket has to work on Wednesday and not on Saturday. A season pass has to work all four days. If every ticket looks the same to whoever is scanning at the entrance, you either wave people through and lose the money, or you slow the line to a crawl while someone squints at a printout.
What they needed was for each ticket to know which days it was good for.
What happened next
Angela's account: "At approximately 7:00 the next morning, I received a personal phone call from Jake. He took the time to fully understand our organization's needs, asked thoughtful questions, and immediately accepted the challenge when I explained that we needed everything completed that same day."
The team built admission windows into event ticketing. Every ticket type can now carry its own admit start and end date, separate from when the ticket goes on sale. A single-day pass admits on that one day. A season pass admits across the whole range. The ticket carries its own rules, so the person at the gate doesn't have to.
The foundation's fair went in with a season pass and a separate pass for each day of the run, each one valid only when it should be. Tickets go out with a QR code, and staff can scan them from a phone at the gate rather than working from a printed list.
"By 4:00 PM that afternoon, the customization was complete, tested, and ready for us to use," Angela wrote. "What seemed impossible the night before had become a reality in less than one business day."
The part that isn't about the software
We should be straight about something: same-day is not our standard turnaround, and we'd be doing you a disservice to imply otherwise. Most requests get scoped, queued, and built on a normal schedule like anywhere else.
What made this one different wasn't heroics. It was that there was nobody in the way. Angela's email reached the person who could say yes. He called her at seven in the morning and asked real questions instead of opening a ticket. The developers who needed to build it heard the actual problem, not a summary of a summary.
That's a structural thing, not a personality thing, and it's the part we'd want any nonprofit to understand about working with a smaller company.
Angela put the contrast plainly: "Before switching to Argenta last year, we spent thousands of dollars on software that came with expensive monthly fees, long wait times for support, and customer service representatives who never seemed to know who we were. Every time we needed help, we had to start over with someone new. There was no relationship and no real understanding of our mission."
And: "With Argenta, you're not just another account number. You're treated like family. You have real people who know your organization, understand your goals, and genuinely want to help you succeed."
Who this helps now
Admission windows aren't a one-off. They're in the product, so any organization running a multi-day event can use them: fairs, festivals, conferences, tournaments, camp sessions, anything where a ticket should work on some days and not others.
If you're running an event like that and currently solving it with wristband colors and a volunteer with a clipboard, that's the problem this fixes.
Start here
If you're weighing up how your events, ticketing, and donor records should fit together, our free Nonprofit Operations Guide covers how the pieces connect.
And our thanks to Angela and The Chief Mason Griffith Foundation, both for trusting us with a hard deadline and for letting us tell the story.
