Gift membership options in Tessitura

Hi everyone,

We are trying to come up with a better system for gift memberships here at the Science Museum of Minnesota. When we joined Tessitura, we had just established our business with another vendor for gift cards, and we didn't want to change that, so we have continued to use those for gift memberships. It's a great system in many ways; however, over the past few years our needs have shifted, and it's time to rethink our systems.

The system we choose:

- Must be able to sell gift memberships online as well as on the phone and in person

- Must somehow allow the giver to choose when the membership will start and membership cards will be sent. We had all kinds of headaches in our old system because we started the membership as soon as the giver called us; that meant that we had to do a ton of manual work to make sure the cards didn't reach the recipient before the giver even got to tell them about the gift. And of course, every giver wants the recipient to find out at a different time. So either we need to be able to let the giver dictate the start date somehow, or we need to allow them to send the redemption code or whatever it is to themselves, so that they can present it to the recipient at their leisure. That's what we do with the gift cards now.

We are investigating whether we could do digital gift cards with our outside vendor, but I want to at assess native Tessitura functionality as well. Is anyone using gift membership or gift certificate functionality online?

Thanks so much!

Beth Varro