Good morning/afternoon/evening -
We have a data storage conundrum that I suspect is not unique to us in this digital access iteration of our missions--products sold as '1' but representing 'X' people and an institutional interest in reporting the latter within our KPIs.
For the instances I'm primarily concerned about--for simplicity's sake, let's call the program a Zoom workshop series--we do have discrete data for each. The order quantity represents the invite to the Zoom, and the TNEW form data collects the actual number of participants. Sales reporting quickly tells us the essential number of how many sessions we've sold, but where can we log the participant count so that we might also be able to use normal reports or an Analytics widget?
Manually adjusting anything re: pricing would seem to be an absolute no because of financial reconciliation, and we have a few business reasons that we can't change the quantity sold to represent participants.
Anyone tackled this in a way they like? Any creative suggestions?
Much appreciated,
Jamie
My inelegant way of remedying this is that I've created a price type of attendance and we add a line item to the order with that information and the number of seats. That way I can pull based on dollars or number attended.
The other thing I've done to track views is added the numbers in a google sheet and then use an iframe widget to show that information in Analytics.
I am sure the answer you do not want is what we have decided to do. As soon as we realized this was going to be a thing, we had a conversation with our Director of Education and VP of Marketing, and posed this dilemma to them. And, for lack of any good solution, because, quite frankly, who even knows with this stuff, we just decided to bite down, sell everything as single entries for the household and just know that the counts were going to be low since they represented households/potential groups of people and not individuals.
Fair from the best solution, but the upshot is that there is no need to change/augment the data after the fact. We do document which Education events have children and how many children are intending to take the class at the time of registration in a form CSI just in case we need to reference that later for legal/who knows why purposes, but otherwise, we just have been going with the flow of one registrant per household and reporting the numbers as such.
John
Thanks for the info/commiseration. I can't add tickets to the order without massively interfering with a calculation enforcing some quantity limits for ongoing series, but it may be a good solution as a season wrap up step. The idea of the second price type is really interesting.
Indeed! We're having some versions of that convo too--data and KPIs are just different without performance attendance--but student reach isn't a metric we can do without for funding pitches and reports. At least I've got good options for dashboards via spreadsheets, but looking for that magical consolidation of it all.
Hey Jamie,
Hope I reading you right. You want to use a TNEW form data field in analytics at the order level? eg: customer buys a thing (zoom w'shop) and gives you some addition data in the booking (7 participants) and you want to take that and show off averages etc in Analytics?
That's doable. If that's what you want
Other than us not being quite positioned to have those things, yes!
Customer buys 1 (line item)* + numerical data in a custom form field = report/dashboard widget that displays total of the latter.
*They may buy more than 1 within an order, but all should be added to cart as separate line items and will have unique responses per.
More motivation for me to double down on planning how we get a local procedure set up. (PS. I've discovered new complications since your last advice. For everyone, the more you customize, the more trouble you'll discover later...) Thanks.
It's not as hard as one might thing to do Local Sprocs ... especially with amazing TN friends.In your case it's just an update statement which you can find most of the code in 2017 TLCC slides from Education and TNEW: This Site Has Real Class! from the Edmonton/Winspear legends https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Passthrough?itemUri=/tlcc/2017/Pres/08_08_EDU_TNEW.pptm
We do something similar with special price types, but we also use special zones which help us enforce quantity limits. I am not sure if that would help you, but, for example, our school group tours can have as many chaperones as they want, but the number of students is limited. We set up the performance so that the student tickets go in one zone with our capacity limits, and the chaperone tickets go in another. We collect the number of chaperones on the custom form (and exclude those price types from that product type in TNEW), and we have a procedure that adds those tickets in their special zone. This keeps chaperones from influencing the the capacity limits.