We are looking to refine how we track tickets that are underwritten by foundations, corporations, etc for students to attend public performances (non-student matinees) and I wondered how others are handling this situation.
We are currently using a generic comp code. Since we are unable to distinguish staff comps from these underwritten comps, we are considering creating a new Education comp code that will have a $0 value. I think that fixes the tracking issue, but we are left with the concern that these "comp" tickets will affect the overall average ticket price for productions which affects what we pay in royalties, report in sales, etc.
What are you guys doing? Is anyone doing any kind of transfer from contributed to ticketed income?
Thanks,
Keri
We are starting to do this at the AKM using pricing rules.
We're approaching it this way; say we receive $5000 for student admissions in the form of a grant. We'll process that as a contribution the normal way. We then calculate how many student admissions $5000 is worth at the student price type and calculate that as the cap on a pricing rule. We set the pricing rule to make the price zero and we issue a student ticket with a zero value. We name the source code and pricing rule so it's clearly identified that tickets issued using this pricing rule are associated with the organization that issued the grant. This ensures that the $5000 is only used at a specified price type and only on admission to the museum on behalf of the funding organization.
We've used this to track similar initiatives as we've had a lot of people step up and subsidize admission for Syrian refugees, subsidize our summer camps for under-priveledged kids, etc. It's been working well and with the pricing rules reporting it makes it pretty easy to see how each initiative is doing.
Hope that helps.
-Brian