Hello friends!
My theatre is looking at implementing rankings for our subscribers, memberships, artists, board members, etc. This is a whole new world for us! And while I think I understand the technical fundamentals of rankings, I was hoping some folks would be willing to share their experiences, processes or policies around how they build their ranking structure and perhaps what you use your rankings for.
Many thanks in advance!
Hi Kristine,
We use rankings primarily to determine the order we seat our subscriptions in. We only have one rank that applies to everyone; there's not a separate one for board members and one for subscribers etc. We are a black box theater and each show has a different seating arrangement, so at the beginning of the year we sell unseated subscription packages, and then go through and manually seat them all once we have the seating configurations. We want our big donors and long time subscribers to be seated first, so we came up with a formula that takes into account things like years and amount donated, years subscribed, and amount of single ticket purchases. The formula we use was created before my time, but it's just a SQL query we run right before we start the seating process that calculates and updates everyone's rank with the most current information.
Hope that helps!
Sara
Hi Kristine!
We use rankings only for our subscribers. For a portion of the year, we have two seasons on sale at the same time, so we use rankings to unlock certain concerts/discounts to current season's subscribers, but not to upcoming season's subscribers, and vise versa. We've been doing this for a few seasons so far, and it's been working well. We have a stored procedure which adds a constituency to an account, based on what subscription packages they have purchased. We're on TNEW, so when a subscriber logs in, the constituency on their account is linked to a ranking, which in turn triggers a Mode of Sale shift, which is what enables their available concerts and special subscriber pricing. We haven't used rankings for anything else yet, but if you'd like to chat more about this, don't hesitate to reach out!
We only use rankings for Web Rankings (i.e. changing customers MOS online).
We actually have a fairly complicated system for this, with rankings selecting one of eleven of what I call "Web Benefit" modes of sale (as opposed to the default Web and Web Subscription Order Modes of Sale). Web Rankings are their own whole subject, really, outside of other rankings (i.e. traditional subscriber rankings and research-oriented rankings). For us a lot of the complexity arises out of the fact that we assign benefits online for a variety of different possible customer (small a) attributes, such as subscriber status, memberships, and email list enrollment.
There are two big jobs when you have requirements this complicated. The first is to organize and plan out your modes of sale to cover every different permutation of what a customer should be given access to. For us this is access to (multiple) timed on-sales, special performances tied to entitlements, and specific price types. We were able to reduce some (but not all) of the complexity featuring price types when pricing rules became available.
The second big job is figuring out how to compute and maintain rank, and deliver its benefits in a timely manner. For the first I created a "binary switch" scheme for assigning numbers based on each different customer attribute that would grant a benefit. These numbers, added together, would then provide a unique number associated with a unique set of attributes, and I could figure out ranges of these numbers that would connect different groups of customers into a single MOS, which TR_WEB_RANKING allows you set. Note: in some cases the ranges conforming to a specific benefit would be split, but you can have multiple rows with separate ranges pointing to the same MOS, as long as the ranges don't overlap.
--Gawain
We have a custom ranking system based on a list of criteria that was arrived at by committee. Each item is assigned a weight and that's added together to get the total of the rank. The people with the highest total are the the top of our VIP list. We use the ranking for a number of things, but mostly for sub seating.
Below is our list of rank criteria: