Hello all,
It's wonderful reading about all of the ways that Tessitura is helping the Education departments of arts venues around the world!
My organisation is working on offering our education programs through Tessitura, and I'm wondering if anyone else may have a similar experience.
The crux of the issue is how could we offer a range of on demand student talks. The idea being that after browsing descriptions of our student talk offerings, they click on their desired choice, and then enter details to confirm the booking.
The tricky part is how can we make that same session date and time unavailable to other people booking an on demand student talk?
I am assuming that the starting point would be for us to create overlapping performances with the different student talks offered, and then remove from sale the alternatives for that date and time after a person selects a student talk?
Best,
Nicholas
Hi Nicholas,
I have heard of a few ways that this is getting tracked in the Tessitura community.
1. Here at the Science Museum, we use a outside product called Artifax. It's a resource scheduling system that many organizations use to book their venues, create contracts, plan staffing, arrange for other resources, and so on. We use it for our on-demand education programming where we go out to schools. Once you set up an arrangement of times, dates, places, staffing, etc., you can push the data into Tessitura as a performance and take care of the payment. Because Artifax is a robust resource scheduler, it natively takes care of the "overlapping issue" and will stop you before you double-book yourself. I will say that it took a good amount of customization and dedicated time on the part of our IT department to make it happen. This solution would be on the "heavy-duty" end of the spectrum.
2. Some organizations set up one performance for a fiscal year with many "seats," and then sell a "seat" to a customer to track the payment. The times, dates, overlapping, etc. can then be handled with custom screens, notes field, custom reports, and so on. (For example, the Custom Tab of the Ticket Order screen could include a date field where the actual date/time of the performance is tracked. Each time you want to book a new program, you run a custom report that pulls up all of your orders and you see if that date is already booked.) We don't do this ourselves, but Michelle Usadel at the Florentine Opera presented on her organization's arrangement similar to this at the conference this year. I would put this solution on the "lighter" end of the spectrum in terms of implementation ease.
Those are just the ways that I've heard of doing it. I'm happy to provide any more details you need. Best of luck!
-Michael
Here at the Auckland Museum we use Tessitura extensively for our Education progammes. Like the Science Museum, we also use Artifax and then send the data down to Tessitura to sell the tickets.
We have approx 8 education programmes available each day (these programmes vary throughout the year) with up to 7 sessions of each programme running each day. We set it up so each programme has one performance per day and we use Zones to track the sessions, set up as 10am, 11am, 12pm etc. This is how we can track our availability for each session and ensure we don't have two bookings for one zone/session.
We also have a custom screen, where we track the performance name, time, teacher name, year level of students, number of students booked, number of students who actually turn up, the venue, the educator taking the session and the language it's being delivered in. It's pretty detailed, but we have a lot of complex reporting requirements!
All our bookings/ticket sales for this are handled through our Bookings Office, so are not available online for teachers to book themselves (which I think is the direction you are looking towards). Will certainly be following with interest whether anyone else has found a way to do it successfully!
-Alison