Hi Tessiturian marketers out there,
Our marketing department and ticket office jointly decided to stop tracking source codes from ticket sales. This has been a little surprising for me, as campaigns, appeals and sources are an integral and important component of Tessitura business model.
The main argument is that patrons do not declare their sources in a meaningful way to reflect on an array of appeals directed at them. And, when they do, the likelihood of error in transferring the info into Tessitura by tickets sellers is so high that the reports based on it become meaningless.
As a non-marketer, I am wondering if this belief is commonly shared with most of the organizations using Tessitura or not. For those of you who use source codes successfully, what do you do to capture source information with Tessitura? Do you use other tools?
Thanks for sharing your experience and wisdom!
I'm sure that some more experienced marketing minds will weigh in. But my two cents is this: Source codes are valuable, but only if accurate. The objections you noted are pretty common. Some organizations spend a lot of time and energy creating and tracking sources only to have them ignored by marketing managers because they don't trust them.
My solution? Find out what kinds of things the marketing/development folks want to know and then build the smallest set of appeals an sources which will get the job done. Follow that up by ruthlessly maintaining source codes. Inactivate them in a timely fashion so the list doesn't get out of hand.
A patron or donor can communicate something like "I saw your billboard" or "I heard it on the radio" or "my friend told me" which should be enough for a box office person to mark down, provided they don't have to search through 1000 sources to find it.
Where you can get very specific is online and through email campaigns. Wordfly does a great job of this and promo codes on your website are a very specific way to track. But it needs to fit into the strategy formulated by the managers.