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'!
Sorry for this late input but I've been ill. I still wanted to record these thoughts so here goes.
One of the areas in which we struggle is in our Schools Touring area. Currently all bookings are made in a diary with a pencil entry for the number of students involved, contact teacher, address, etc. Attendance number changes, invoicing and payment receipt is recorded off line in spreadsheets with no centralised area. Payment can only currently be made by cheque or EFT. Tax receipts must be manually created.
Creating individual performances and managing these through ticketing is not a viable option for a multitude of reasons not withstanding the people booking the tours are varied and must be able to instanteously and at a glance know if there is time and resource available for the booking.
On a "wish list" level, it would be ideal if a calender type entry could be linked into Tessitura where the operator enters the location, date, time, pencilled attendees, cost per person, etc. in a form which translates to a line item on the Tessitura calender. This would carry the Tessitura consituent record for contact and invoicing information as well as allow payment and invoicing options. All aspects of the line item would be editable to ensure there is always provision for updating and additional invoicing if required. Reporting on these events would need to be available in order to flow the income and audit the events.
No tickets need be issued, and because we can't be in once place more than once per entry, conflict would be resolved and data centralised. Payment would flow through the Tessitura system to the accounts department giving the operator autonomy on invoicing and follow up. There would need to be a notes/contact area in the form to carry records of conversations as well as reference to associations to the company/school record to link contact to organisation.
In a nutshell - one line, one calendar entry, one record, one touch.
Lesley (or any other readers),
Can you expand a bit on your thought that "No tickets need be issued, and because we can't be in once place more than once per entry"?
What resource are you controlling that can't be in more than one place more than once per entry? A teacher? A room? A piece of equipment like a projector?
You also mention an operator enters the number of attendees and the cost per person. Do you see there being pricing rules on such an item or does it vary so widely that you would always enter the price manually? If you were able to create a type of lineitem in a order that was a sort of an adhoc lineitem--in other words you add it to an order and it creates the "event" on the fly, adding it to the calendar--does that describe more or less what you envision?
Hi Chuck,
Elaboration as requested. Our schools touring company attend schools across the country performing for up to 200 students at a time (dependant on the size of the school assembly hall). There may be multiple performances on the same day but never at the same time (one hall/one performance) so the junior school may have a performance in the morning and the senior classes have one in the afternoon (as a for instance). At times other schools in the area may piggy back on another schools booking meaning that 2-3 schools may all attend in the one auditorium but the booking would be handed by the principal school's teaching staff. No tickets are issued but the school is invoiced for the total number of students in attendance so there is a need to record the number of attending students and, because of the vicissitudes inherent in booking students to anything this needs to be able to be altered. Once the school is invoiced, we turn up to perform....
Pricing is currently standard per student but it is at the discretion of our Tours Manager to alter the rate per student if need arises.
The concept of adding resources to the booking (projector, props, curtain, actors) hadn't occurred to me but this could assist scheduling greatly - especially if there's space issues.
Because of the multitude of venues (schools and halls) we perform in it's not practical to build as a performance in Tessitura - especially since we may not revisit a county town for a couple of years to challenge a new audience.
The way I see it in my mind's eye the process would be similar to booking a meeting in an outlook calendar but greatly expanded to cater for the accounting and scheduling needs of the process. The venue would be typed in the first time, remembered the next. The fiscal year would be dictated by the date of the performance. Parameters could (should) be able to be limited in terms of number of attendees (so it can't be overbooked!) but these should be able to be user overridden.
So, yes, I'm looking for functionality that will create an "event" on the fly, allow invoicing and scheduling to be incorporated. Allow association of one or more school to the record and carry contact notes through the process. All working from one easily accessible screen that is user friendly. Not too much to ask! I'm not sure I'd start from the order screen. I'm thinking it would work better from the calendar since that's the place people will go to see if they can schedule the date and time. The mechanism behind the booking could eventuate in an order that carries the details but the access point would probably live better in the calender.
And now I can see that this would work for our Opera Centre Tours and Insights nights!
Lesley.
This is such an interesting idea!
We are using Tessitura in a fashion, to book our facility rentals but it has always been a little on the clunky side. Our rentals tend to have a set price, but there are always exceptions and adjustments being made.
We first started creating a "performance" for every event, but that made for a lot of work on the IT department (since the folks booking the rentals were never comfortable with performance building). We have since moved to a rental "performance" that has seats at various prices that can be booked to get the total price of the rental but that does not reflect the date of the rental in any fashion.
This process is a little easier for the end user, but does not have all the information needed to be really useful for the folks booking the rentals. The result of all of this is that we generally only put the rental info in Tessitura when the client wants to pay with a credit card. Any rental that is paid for by check is handled through other means.
If we could make the "performance" build process a one step process for the rentals team I think they would use Tessitura a whole lot more.
I'm so glad someone brought this up in conversation - we have been trying to use tessitura as our "one-stop shop" for all info related to all events - receptions, dinners, meet and greets, rental events, parties - on and off-site, ticketed and not - because we love the idea of being able to know what our patrons are doing - no matter whether its ticketed or not, in our building or not, etc.
It's hard. Tessitura isn't built to be an event management software, and so far we haven't found an integrated solution.
But if it did have a more integrated event management platform, it would go a long way toward address several key organizational issues:
1. Where does the master calendar live? Can EVERYONE, from the CEO to the Facilities person, see it and trust that it's up to date? Just think of the kind of customer service we could provide for our patrons if we had info at our fingertips about everything going on in our building
2. Getting everyone in the organization (in particular production and education) working with Tess. Tracking artists residencies, free workshops, camps - all those things are hard to do in Tessitura now because it's not meant to be used that way. So we keep that stuff in excel. And our front line staff don't have quick and easy access to it when a patron calls with a question.
I think this goes back to the redefinition of an "event" - to be anything your organization is doing - ticketed or not.
Jodi