Alternatives to Mindbody?

Devin,

This is a topic so very close to my heart. Our school recently moved to mindbody for their adult classes. I lobbied heavily against it, but in the end was overruled because I simply couldn’t replicate “the experience and ease of use” that mindbody provided from the schools perspective. 

The school was not 100% wrong in their concerns and decision. In my opinion Tessitura, and TNEW, is not quite there yet in terms of what they offer in this sphere specifically. I would love to be part of some sort of working group that could perhaps help improve this for the application —there is some talk of having an open space discussion at TLCC2019, which I will unfortunately not be attending this year. This is a conversation I have had with others so maybe we can get enough interest together to create my dream working group scenario. All this said, if you are interested in talking about this please feel free to reach out directly. 

mdonnelly@bostonballet.org

best,

Michaela

Hi Michaela,
Thanks for your speedy response! Yes, there's no denying it's an easy user experience - I love the mindbody app for booking my own fitness classes around the city! We're experiencing challenges with it, particularly with multi-day dance intensives. I'd love to participate in an open discussion about this at TLCC2019

I'll reach out shortly! 

Thanks again,

I echo Micahela's statement. We went with Active through Camp Broadway because it was easier to use and setup...and they handle all the health forms which released us from any liability. Until Tessitura completely redesigns class registration with connections to a secure place to store health information of students and such and make it easier to use and work for registrations...it's a hard option to use. There is a class registration component you can purchase from Tessitura...but it's VERY system table heavy for setup...and not inexpensive to purchase. Combine that with any TNEW customizations you might need and the ROI is just not there. Our cost for Active is VERY minimal as we piggy back off the Camp Broadway license and was really easy to setup.

I'm hopeful that Education classes is a huge focus in the next version. The new resource scheduling functionality is a great first step...but we need more focus on class registration as that is VERY different than selling tickets or securing memberships/donations.

Supporting Christopher's comments, I should say that the school does use TNEW/Tessitura customizations for their academy classes and yes, they are very system table heavy. We have a custom screen for school information (health ins. issues, waivers etc.) as well. Invariably, when the school goes to set up a new season of classes some step gets skipped and we are digging through system tables and content tabs to figure out where they went off. Its not a pretty sight, and I bang my head in frustration about this several times a year.

This is not to say that some of the pain points with the process we run into fairly regualry are entirely the fault of Tessitura and what it offers, some of our issues are our own making, based on business decisions that the school prioritizes over what is functionally a better option from an admin ease of use and patron UX. That being said, until I can offer a better solution within the application I have no way to effect change on how we do things and how we offer things. 

I would love to see Education be a major part of the next version. I think the direction that they are going with product types and resource functionality is definitely heading us in the right direction.  

Cheers, 

M

We use Tessitura (and TNew) alone for our theatre & school, and have been for about 5 years now. Classes are about 75% of our revenue, so this was a big investment (of time more than finances) to make the system work well for us, but integration with our box office has been a huge boon. Tess has its perks (like building customizations), but it can definitely be a little clunky in the user experience compared to MindBody, if you have a lot of info to capture (health info, waivers, etc).

There is an advisory committee working with Tessitura to make the education experience more beneficial and they advocate for getting better education features on the roadmap (I was on an education panel last year at TLCC with someone on that committee, it's fairly new). There will likely be some sessions about this topic at TLCC about using Tess and TNew for classes that you could check out. There were quite a few last year, and I think it's steadily getting more and more of a focus by the Tess developers and clients alike.

Here at The Groundlings, we also have a lot of drop-in classes and multi-class sets, and we have prerequisites for the bulk of those, which makes everything a little more complex. If you want to chat about our setup, let me know! The bulk of our registration system is standard to Tess with only a few small modifications. 

~Carrie 

We use Mindbody for our Adult Ballet (drop-in) classes here too. I brought up switching them over to Tessitura/TNEW since we went live with the TNEW Education Registration Base Code customization back in January, but our Academy team felt the functionality just wasn't there yet to get rid of Mindbody completely. I'm not familiar with the app myself, so I'm following this conversation to educate myself on features/functionality that we can bring into Tessitura once it's been developed. I'd love to listen into an Open Space discussion on this topic too.

Hi Devon, We are also using Mindbody for our School open Classes and in the process(of about 3-4 years) of trying to get our school on Tessitura. We are currently very close to just getting our Summer classes to give us a starting point but it has been a trying process and really wish there was a better Education platform for classes and registrations in without too many customization's.  We are in a Consortium so are customizing is limited due to control groups. We find that Mindbody has been a great tool for our open classes and would love to have a bigger discussion at the TLCC2019 conference and possibly have an open-space discussion about this? 

Best,

Tanaz Walendziewicz

Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre

twalendziewicz@pittsburghballet.org

We built a solution that registers classes in Tessitura as a performance and captures the registration data in formstack. It kind of works, but I would really prefer to use something like Mindbody. Ideally, Tessitura would develop a class registration module. These customizations are not ideal and it definitely seems like the community wants a better integrated solution.

Hi Devon - we use Tessitura for dance and art class registration, summer camps, and booking assemblies and workshops in local schools around our area. While some things work well, there is a lot of customization we had to do. For example, online class and summer class registration is something we custom built; we are now trying to find a better way to handle a lot of the paperwork our dance and art schools require to be filled out.

My general take on the state of managing education and community programs in Tessitura is that we are all basically trying to adapt software functionality designed for other purposes to somehow fit these processes. Sometimes it works reasonably well; other times, it is a bit of a cluttered mess. 

I agree with all of you; I would love to see a stronger focus on this area with solutions that are well-integrated.

Thanks,
David

Hi all,

This conversation is very similar to another I was involved in a few months back. It seems many organizations are trying to move forward with online class registrations with some degree of difficulty. I agree that the current Tessitura/TNEW functionality falls short from a class registration perspective. We struggle a lot with "work arounds" and are trying, but not yet succeeding, to offer a more seamless online registration process to our constituents; one that mirrors what you would experience with other software such as Mind Body as this has become the expectation of most online consumers.

We currently sell our classes as performances and collect our online registrations as CSIs. It’s cumbersome and involves going into individual accounts after the fact to finesse our constituent and financial information. I too hope to see some developments in this area soon. As a student I use Mind Body and I love how effortlessly it seems to function when I make purchases and reserve classes online.

Karin 

Carrie mentioned below that there is an advisory committee working working with Tessitura on this issue. Does anyone know what organizations have people working with this group? Is there someone who could weigh in on this thread and give us a sense of what is being worked on? I know I've had one-off conversations with people at the conferences but I don't really know who else to speak to. Clearly, this is a major issue that a lot of us are dealing with, and frankly we are losing data not being able to integrate MindBody back to Tessitura, so I would dearly love to bring them back into Tessitura/stop more classes from moving to MB. 

Cheers, 

Michaela 

Hi Everyone - 

I wanted to hop on this thread and say hello, and to let you know that we at Tessitura are not only watching this thread with interest, we are extremely invested in taking action to help you be more successful. 

We've heard about your need to have more effective and robust Education registration and other functionality through a variety of channels and formats over the years. While we have provided several different iterations of features and customization in an attempt to address various gaps, we are also continually looking at ways we can get you the functionality you need. We are still listening.

One avenue of possibility is through an integration - be it Mindbody or something else. There is an active internal conversation we are having right now to look at scope and feasibility of such a step. This conversation was actually initiated by a group of like-minded educators such as yourselves on this thread. Our goal is by TLCC to have enough information, planning, and strategic vision to have a thoughtful and actionable conversation with interested organizations at the conference.

Stay tuned for more information on what that will look like, it will probably either be organized through the TLCC Portal or as a call out on this forum in order to get the broadest participation.

On a side note, we do have our Member Advisory Committee which provides member advice and feedback around our Product Development Road Map. I'm not sure if that is what Carrie is referring to in her post or something else, but I have internal feelers out to see if it is something I'm not personally aware of. (Carrie, feel free to pipe in if you have more info).

Cheers,

Heather

Not totally sure whether she was on the member advisory committee or something more specific for education--I thought it was the latter. I'll reach out to see if I can get more info!

Heather, 

Thank you for that update. Unfortunately I will not be at TLCC this summer, but I would very much love to be kept in the loop and I would love to be part of the organizations that provide feedback and ideas, please feel free to reach out to me directly mdonnelly@bostonballet.org.

Thanks, 

Michaela

Hi Heather,

I just wanted to follow up on this. I might have missed this conversation at TLCC, but we are very interested in a better solution for our education registrations. Was there any outcome or next steps on this?  I'd like more information if possible.

Thanks,

Patrick