Seat Naming - seat location information

Michael,

Hello again ….

From someone who has spent two years trying to make sense and clean-up our seat sale program, I highly suggest not using attributes.  I have found it very difficult to determine which seats have been sold, which are available, which were promised, etc.  They way the seat sale program was handled here at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in the past was to add an attribute and then record the seat name in Names/Recognition.  As that space has character limits, many of the names were abbreviated, plaques misprinted … the list goes on.  In attempting to re-organize and re-launch the project, I have worked with my ticketing department to create seat maps of the halls were we sell seats and then I go in and sell a ticket to that seat.  Our hope in the future is to be able to offer seat-sale opportunities online where our patrons can use seat buddy to check out the view of the seat they wish to purchase and to be able to choose their own seat from the web in real time.  When you open a donor’s record, you would look for the performance of “Seat Sale” and look up the seat or seat locations there.  If you wanted to use a constituency to indicate this person was a seat owner, I am sure your IT team could write a script to make the constituency appear automatically and save you time on manual entry.

I think a few other organizations are handling their seat-sale programs the same way. 

Good luck with this project too!

Amber

____________________________________________________________ 
Michael Mariano  | Database Manager
New York City Center | 130 W. 56^th Street | New York, NY 10019
Phone: 212.763.1255 | Fax: 212.247.4439 | Web: www.NYCityCenter.org

Michael,

Hello again ….

From someone who has spent two years trying to make sense and clean-up our seat sale program, I highly suggest not using attributes.  I have found it very difficult to determine which seats have been sold, which are available, which were promised, etc.  They way the seat sale program was handled here at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in the past was to add an attribute and then record the seat name in Names/Recognition.  As that space has character limits, many of the names were abbreviated, plaques misprinted … the list goes on.  In attempting to re-organize and re-launch the project, I have worked with my ticketing department to create seat maps of the halls were we sell seats and then I go in and sell a ticket to that seat.  Our hope in the future is to be able to offer seat-sale opportunities online where our patrons can use seat buddy to check out the view of the seat they wish to purchase and to be able to choose their own seat from the web in real time.  When you open a donor’s record, you would look for the performance of “Seat Sale” and look up the seat or seat locations there.  If you wanted to use a constituency to indicate this person was a seat owner, I am sure your IT team could write a script to make the constituency appear automatically and save you time on manual entry.

I think a few other organizations are handling their seat-sale programs the same way. 

Good luck with this project too!

Amber

____________________________________________________________ 
Michael Mariano  | Database Manager
New York City Center | 130 W. 56^th Street | New York, NY 10019
Phone: 212.763.1255 | Fax: 212.247.4439 | Web: www.NYCityCenter.org