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Managing sponsors' complementary tickets

Martin Havn
$organization

Hi all,

as pretty recent alumens of the Tessitura Network, we're currently working on moving our sponsor-handling from an external, separate CRM-system into Tessitura, specifically the Plans module.

One issue that's come up is how to best handle the pool of complementary tickets we promise sponsors as part of their deal with us.

The way it works is, we promise the sponsor 100 tickets (for instance) that they can use at their leisure throughout the season. Typically, the coordinator in charge at the sponsor calls a few days in advance and asks for 4 tickets to a specific performance.

Would appreciate any suggestions as to how we can record this pool of 100 tickets to start with, and then write them down as they're spent throughout the season. 

They aren't held or allocated in any specific performance in advance.

I've been thinking about using a ranking and value or attribute and value, or maybe there's a smart way to use CSI's or Plans?

Thanks in advance, and all the best from Denmark :-)

Martin

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  • $organization
    We have a couple ways that we manage complimentary tickets at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

    We manage staff comps through attributes; at the beginning of the fiscal year, we use the Update Attributes utility to load 20 comps in each staff record. When a staff member uses a comp, the cashier sells the ticket and then manually decrements the value on the attribute. Simple and effective - we've done this for the entire 8 years that we've been on the system.

    For some of our higher-level members, we wanted them to be able to redeem their comps online. For this purpose we made a local table to house the data. When a ticket is sold with the applicable price type, etc, it decrements from the table. The number of tickets available on each account shows in the header, so staff can easily keep track of that. These benefits are more complicated - things like "X number of free films per day" and "X number of free special exhibits per exhibit." I think the complicated list of benefits plus the desire to redeem online is why we did this one with a custom table. It's not without its dangers, however; we've had a lot of issues with it over the years, mainly when there is a change in special exhibit or when there's a software upgrade. So, as with all customizations, really think it through before you go this route.

    Beth Varro
    Membership Director
    Science Museum of Minnesota


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  • $organization
    We have a couple ways that we manage complimentary tickets at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

    We manage staff comps through attributes; at the beginning of the fiscal year, we use the Update Attributes utility to load 20 comps in each staff record. When a staff member uses a comp, the cashier sells the ticket and then manually decrements the value on the attribute. Simple and effective - we've done this for the entire 8 years that we've been on the system.

    For some of our higher-level members, we wanted them to be able to redeem their comps online. For this purpose we made a local table to house the data. When a ticket is sold with the applicable price type, etc, it decrements from the table. The number of tickets available on each account shows in the header, so staff can easily keep track of that. These benefits are more complicated - things like "X number of free films per day" and "X number of free special exhibits per exhibit." I think the complicated list of benefits plus the desire to redeem online is why we did this one with a custom table. It's not without its dangers, however; we've had a lot of issues with it over the years, mainly when there is a change in special exhibit or when there's a software upgrade. So, as with all customizations, really think it through before you go this route.

    Beth Varro
    Membership Director
    Science Museum of Minnesota


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  • $organization in reply to Beth Varro

    Wow, some great suggestions, thank you all for chiming in. As often with Tessitura, there really are a lot of different ways to a useful solution. I'll do some more experimentation, as we need to find a way that's convenient enough to use, and also allows for some aggregate reporting.

    Eventually, we'll want to develop a self-service solutions that'll allow sponsors to get their tickets online, so there's something to keep in mind too. 

    Beth, even though the custom table solution has not been flawless, do you find it's been worth you trouble?

    Thanks

    Martin