Hi Everyone – I’m looking for your advice, especially from those spaces who have strong subscription programs!
Signature Theatre has never used rankings. Now that we are a bit over a year into Tessitura, we would like to start creating and using rankings. I have some questions for you all:
1. Do you rank patrons at your theatre? Donors only, subscribers only, both, or otherwise?
2. If you do rank and have a written ranking policy or procedure would you mind sharing it with me?
3. Does anyone simply do it by dollars? IE: Every dollar from that patron, either for a ticket, subscription or donation is = 1 point? If so, how many years back do you look?
4. Does anyone use rankings or take ranking as one of the factors used to create a seating order when seating subscribers? If so, how do you do it?
Thanks all! I’m so excited to take this next step.
Jen
Jennifer BuzzellDirector of Marketing and SalesSignature Theatre4200 Campbell Ave.Arlington, VA 22206
buzzellj@sigtheatre.org571 527 1830
Hi Lucie
Chiming in.....Yes, you're right. Rank is a smallint data type, so its maximum value is 32,767.
If someone wanted to use ranking for dollar values, they could put in an enhancement request to change the data type to int, which would hold values up to 2 billion... That would probably cope with all of our donors, even the bigly-est.
ps. I like your ranking scheme - that looks really useful.
Ken
There is a numeric limit (SQL gurus, chime in) of something over 32,000, so it’s my understanding that a dollar-for-dollar ranking system is not the way to go.
We have several ranks:
· Subscriber Donor Amount
· Subscriber Renewal Date
· Subscriber Support Groups
· Subscriber Total Sub Years
· Subscriber Ttl Consecutive Yrs
· Subscriber Board Membership
· Subscriber Subscription Value
· Subscriber Customer Svce Bonus
· Subscriber Compiled Rank
· Current Subscriber
· Current Donor
We have a report created for us by Paul Westerman at JCA (the company helped us with our Tessitura installation in 2004-2005) that allows us to assign point values to all ranks that start with “Subscriber.” For instance, for the Subscriber Donor Amount, you can pick the dates of the donations that count. All contributions received and credited within the specified data range get added together. Cumulative donations between $2,500 and $10,000 are assigned 10 points; between $10,000 and $25,000 20 points; etc. The Subscriber Customer Svce Bonus allows you to add an amount manually if you want to bump up a rank for some non-data-related reason. All Subscriber ranks are compiled into one number that we can use to sort patrons by rank for the purpose of subscription seating. We add these reports via report that runs perhaps once a year, at the point of seating.
The last two ranks allow us to control certain ticket offers to subscribers or to donors at a certain level. Current Subscriber gives a numeric rank to all subscribers (based on having the subscriber constituency). Current Donor has an assigned number between 1 and 12 (based on membership amount). They are managed by a scheduled SQL job.
Rank can be useful.
Lucie
We created a custom ranking system based on a list of criteria. Each item is assigned a weight and that's added together to get the total of the rank. The people with the highest total are the the top of our VIP list. We use the ranking for a number of things, but mostly for sub seating.
Below is our list of rank criteria:
Melissa – this is amazing info, thanks and just what I need. Can you tell me, does the subscription money and single ticket money get the same “weight” as contributed funds, or do those get higher rank per dollar?
From: Tessitura Marketing Forum [mailto:forums-marketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Melissa Scott Sent: Friday, December 9, 2016 9:19 AM To: Jen Buzzell <buzzellj@sigtheatre.org> Subject: Re: [Tessitura Marketing Forum] Patron Ranking Questions
From: Jennifer Buzzell <bounce-jenniferbuzzell1921@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 12/8/2016 3:26:10 PM
Jennifer Buzzell Director of Marketing and Sales Signature Theatre 4200 Campbell Ave. Arlington, VA 22206
buzzellj@sigtheatre.org 571 527 1830
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Donations get a higher weight then sub and single ticket money. Donations are weighed at 2 points for every dollar, subs at 1.5 for every dollar, and single ticket 1 for every dollar.
Feel free to email me if you have other questions, happy to help.
This is great, I was literally just thinking about this with an idea along these lines. I really appreciate it!
From: Tessitura Marketing Forum [mailto:forums-marketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Melissa Scott Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2016 2:32 PM To: Jen Buzzell <buzzellj@sigtheatre.org> Subject: RE: [Tessitura Marketing Forum] Patron Ranking Questions
From: Jennifer Buzzell <bounce-jenniferbuzzell1921@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 12/9/2016 2:36:53 PM