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Bonus Gift Certificates

Sara Broderick
$organization

Hello all,

We are discussing the idea of offering "bonus" gift certificates as a refund option for patrons: so for example, instead of getting refund someone could choose to get Gift Certificate with 10% bonus amount of what their ticket was. We do something similar to this every year during Black Friday, but it's a tedious process for the Box Office to go back and add all the bonuses, and it ends up being 2 gift certificates instead of 1 since there's no way to add amounts to existing gift certificates. It would be great if there were a way to add this functionality to the event cancellation utility and then we wouldn't have to process all of these bonus gift certificates manually. Is anyone else considering adding this option for patrons? If so, is there anything you're doing to ease the process other than setting every gift certificate up manually?

Thanks!

Sara

  • $organization

    Thanks for posing these questions Sara! We are considering doing the same thing. I look forward to a response as well. 

  • $organization

    Hi, 
    Although we aren't doing it as an automated process, we started offering Flex Tickets in April.  The Flex Ticket is actually a gift certificate that adds 20% value.  We are selling them in $60 increments, so our operators enter a $50 payment form the buyer, and then use a payment method called Flex Bonus Dollars to add $10 and then the two combined payments go into 1 Flex Ticket (again, really a gift certificate).  The Flex Bonus Dollars is pulling from a Marketing Expense GL, that presumably will be paid off from the Marketing budget.   Although it's still manual processing, our end result is a single gift certificate rather than the two you were describing.

    I hope this helps,

    Don

  • $organization in reply to Don McKim

    What is the marketing jargon for enticing a purchase and what are the redemption guidelines?  We do something similar for gift certificate sales around the holidays.  Wondering how your FLEX ticket campaign works.  Thanks!

  • $organization in reply to J. Paul FitzGerald

    Hi J.Paul,

    This is the link to our Flex Ticket page:  https://www.stnj.org/events/flex-tickets .

    I think Flex Tickets have been fairly successful and have sold almost 200 of them since we launched in early May.  Which, if you consider the state of things, is a nice injection of income.

  • $organization

    We are running an incentive program. We moved all 2020-2021 tickets to an on account payment method, we are telling patrons that anything still on account on December 31st will earn 10% back and will be reflected in their account by mid January-just in time, hopefully, for rollover and renewal season. We’ll put that 10% in a new payment method that can only be used on tickets and we’ll have that value expire in June 2022. Our development department was able to find a funder to make this happen!