Currently when our box has to call a list of people for marketing purposes they use a spreadsheet. This seems inefficient especially if the constituent is on several spreadsheets.
They also use spreadsheets to track people who are hoping to buy tickets that are sold out.
What does your company do to avoid using spreadsheets to track information about activities that are tied to Tessitura information?
What about Plans and assigning box office staff as workers? Or maybe a creative use of CSIs?
Hi Jason,
We use CSI (Customer Service Issues) for wait list and have for years. It works for us very well. CSI can be used for your marketing calls as well. Or Plans can also be an option for constituent contacts records.
Unknown said:They also use spreadsheets to track people who are hoping to buy tickets that are sold out.
We "seat" patrons in wait-list fake perfs for selected, popular productions. If/when they can be seated in a real perf, we have an order, ready to go.
I'll chip in a vote for Plans - our Patron Services Office is a hybrid inbound/outbound model, so all of our outbound 'leads,' whether it's for subscription sales, fundraising, or courtesy calls get tracked as plan steps. These have worked well since they can easily pull into Reminders or My Portfolio to work through a list of calls, and they're set up to track due dates, completed dates, extra notes from the conversation, etc. Each season we mass-populate ticketing and development plans/workers for the year for subscribers and donors, so a lot of the building blocks are already there - it may be a bit more heavy lifting if the plans aren't already in place.
As for waitlisting sold out shows, we borrowed an idea I saw here on the forums and set up a separate Waitlist MOS that only allows for unseated/unpaid orders in a given production. Then as seats became available, we could pull orders based on create date to figure out who's next in line to purchase tickets (and the order already has a lineitem for their preferred performance date). We've only used it for one show in our smaller theatre since rolling it out, but it was fairly successful and much more patron-friendly than just turning people away entirely.
The overwhelming majority of our marketing mail lists are built out of Extractions in Tessitura: after all, that's our best source of information about people. Do you have other sources of leads that your marketing department relies on instead?
As to waiting lists, back when we had a custom site I build functionality such that a keyword could be applied to a sold out show and it would still be selectable from the calendar, but would take you to a page where (once you logged in) you could click a button to ask to be put on the waiting list. This attached a CSI to the account, where the CSI was attached to the performance in question (used a similar mechanism to create a post-show comments page). The box office could then use the CSI report to pull all relevant customers in first come order to seat people if seats became available.
Now that we're on TNEW we just rely on other web sign-up list tools (I think we've used a few, not sure what they're using right now). On the minus side, it's not kept within Tessitura, but on the positive you don't have to have an account to sign up.
Evan,
The MOS for waitlists sounds like a great idea and I wonder why something like this never crossed my mind before. I do wonder then, how do you get rid of all the orders that end up not being seated? Do you run a report that removes those orders?
I also am a big supported of Plans and would love to see your tables on what you have set for your plan types, status, step types, etc. Do you have these plans using only one campaign or several different ones? For instance do you use only one campaign for all courtesy calls or do you use a campaign that relates to what the call is referencing and so might have several different courtesy call plans? Do you create new plans each fiscal year for courtesy calls? The issue we face sometimes with plans is, if the plan really doesn't have anything to do with a particular campaign you still have to have a campaign attached to the plan.
Apologies for the late response!
For the Waitlist MOS, I wasn't certain so went back to check, and it looks like we haven't run any sort of comprehensive clean-up. It was a production in our smaller theatre, so it didn't create a huge amount of extra noise in the database - but it is a good consideration if waitlists start getting used more often. I wonder if wiping out orders but maintaining some level of info somewhere else would be best - you could use it to capture interest for marketing similar upcoming shows, for example...
For plans, it feels like we've got some evolution still to go but currently, all subscribers get a new Marketing/Ticketing plan built as each new fiscal year/season rolls around. That houses most of the ticketing communications/campaigns going to them for the year - whether it's a renewal courtesy call, a re-acquisition campaign if they don't renew their package, or a courtesy call for some other reason related to ticketing (obstructed view moves, for example). We also use some custom fields in there for tracking reasons if a subscriber chooses not to renew, etc.