Hi everyone!
We are currently looking to implement a membership program and are exploring a few different options. I'm wondering if anyone has had success doing either of the following and if you are willing to share some of your experiences:
1) One option is a "pay once for the season" option. They pay a flat fee and are able to receive member benefits for the remainder of the current ESO season. I would like to see the initiation date be "Today" in order to accurately reflect when specifically they became a member - however, I'm not seeing a way to indicate that regardless of the initiation date then expiration date is always the end of our fiscal year. Is this possible or do I have to have the memberships always start on a fixed date to make the end date also fixed? If so, is there an easy way to see when the membership was purchased since the initiation date will be inaccurate?
2) We are also looking at a "month to month" option. Members can purchase a membership at any time and cancel at any time; paying a monthly fee and receiving member benefits for as long as they have the membership active. How would something like this look in the membership setup? Does anyone else do memberships this way through Tessitura? Do you have any words of advice for pulling such a plan off?
We are also attempting to address other concerns that have come up during our discussions so far. Since we are a symphony, being a member would obviously include a discount benefit of some kind for ticket purchases. We aren't sure of (a) how to control/restrict ticket purchases per concert per member and (b) how to allow multiple members to reserve seats together without having to make multiple orders at a time under each person's account. We are also looking at projected revenue/losses for these and notice with the month to month membership model it's possible that someone could sign up for only one month to get a discounted ticket and then cancel right away which is counterproductive to us from a revenue standpoint as well as our intent to build our customer's engagement by encouraging multiple performance purchases.
In general, if you do have memberships at your organization and are willing to share your experiences with me I would be very appreciative! The upcoming season will be our pilot/testing season and I don't have much time to get it sorted out from the Tessitura side of things so I'm hoping my fellow Tessiturians can give me a hand on this one. :)
Thanks and feel free to connect with me offline!
Beth
bhawryluk@winspearcentre.com
Hi Beth,
We are pretty new to Memberships at SDC but I'll throw my 2c in for what it's worth
1) I might be misunderstanding your needs but if you use a beginning of season fixed date for your initiation then your transaction date for the membership would still give you when they became a member
2) If you set up the Expire date as 1 month after initiation that would be fine. You would have short renew and lapse dates but if you only have one level then the renew period could be a month as well.
re the benefits it seems like Pricing Rules based on Constituencies could be adequate. There are a few Pricing Rules reports that would give you an idea of the losses you are getting ant you can project off of that. With regards to limiting the discounts per membership, with pricing rules you can also run an exclusion list in the Constituent Criteria tab for members that have already redeemed the benefit. I'll have to have a play with this myself.
Hope it goes well.