Welcome from the Tessitura Next Generation Board Steering Committee!
We will be very focused on ensuring we have significant membership input throughout the Next Generation Software development project, and our hope is to foster creative thinking, to be forward-looking and visionary.
In that vein, over the next few weeks we'll toss out some questions to spur dialogue and to engage your thoughts in creative directions. Here are a few questions that have been on our minds as we have gone through the process of envisioning this project. We would love to hear your ideas and thoughts, so please share them through this forum:
How would you define a "ticket"?
How would you define an "event"? (consider all types of events, including fundraising and education events, not just performances).
In answering these questions, consider the ways our organizations might be packaging the various 'items' we sell. Does a ticket do more than get you into a performance? Can a ticket be good for more than one person or more than one 'item'? Can a ticket by "reused", used for multiple items and or entries? Can it include merchandise, food, drinks, parking, online access/activities? In what ways could contribution and memberships affect a ticket?
Think 'out of the box'!
Here goes ... these are some ticketed elements that dont fit into traditional event/ticket models, which we currently manage by building a performance per day with zones representing time slots (tours, restaurants) or a perf per month as a form of inventory management (merchandise, vouchers etc).
Tours: Requirement for some form of time-based entry module, without need to build a performance for every possible product, time slot and date. Ideally supports the addition of multiple on-demand tours at the same time, without requirement to build ‘on spec’ inventory in advance. Would require tracking of ‘inventory’ (ie # of customers allowed per tour).
Integration with guide/staff availability?
Restaurant meals: Either as an open voucher or at a timed 'sitting'. Ideally we could nominate the restaurant and/or the date and time of the ‘event’ at point of purchase from some kind of pre-defined set of allowable values, without the requirement to set up “performances”.
Also a means of tracking redemption of open-dated vouchers.
Parking: Either as an open voucher or for a specific date or time period. Vouchers that can carry credit along the lines of Gift Certificates
Merchandise, preferably with inventory control. Currently only option is to build ‘performances’, which come with all the baggage of often irrelevant dates, times, season structure.
Group tickets. A single ‘ticket’ that represents a group purchase. A common example is education perfs where a single order confirmation is issued to the teacher in lieu of a ticket for each attendee.
Performance ticket that includes a redeemable bonus component (eg free or discounted drink, parking, program etc)
Meant to add that an issue we struggle with when compiling a package order that includes 'real' elements like performances with open or nominally dated elements like tours, vouchers, restaurants is the notion of a 'consumption' date, ie for date based reporting purposes when do we say the package actually occurred.
Parking is an area we have struggled to slot nicely into the system, especially selling and tracking/reporting on tickets for participants who park on a regular basis and feel the 'normal' one-off parking rate is too expensive when it is a regular cost and on top of their event ticket.
One of the challenges we're facing right now is how to handle complex multi-day educational and community events, where customers attend one or more components of an event, including required and optional sessions, concurrent breakout sessions, and meals. In addition, we want to capture the name of each individual attendee, not just the customer name. And, of course, we'd like to offer customers the convenience of online registration. These events are really more like mini-conferences than elevated events, single tickets or packages.