Greetings Tessiturians,
We frequently offer our theatre spaces to other organizations for rentals, and we are looking into offering (or requiring) that their ticket sales go through our box office. I know this is something that is frequently done by other organizations and I am hoping those of you who have managed this may be able to provide some guidance.
What sort of separation do you put in place for these orders? Is it just basic user groups and permissions or is there anything more in-depth you do to protect constituents and data of a separate organization from mingling with your own data? I know Tessitura offers varied levels of separation up to full consortium splits so I would greatly appreciate any advice moving forward.
Thanks!
We generally require that everything goes through us: sales go through our box office, our staff manage entrances (scanning) etc. We used to allow renters to opt to just have a roll of tickets printed if they were going to manage the sales themselves, but with the ubiquity of online sales and ticket scanning that's pretty much a thing of the past.
Since it's our box office we consider the customers to be our customers. They are not specially flagged, if we need to distinguish them we do it by their purchase history (often they are our customers as well). We provide general sales reports, but we only provide customer information to renters under special circumstances.
We separate our rental productions using Control Groups and Seasons, and a separately branded TNEW site, but our Box Office has full access to both sides of our business (our rentals and our own presentation seasons). We have separately branded confirmation emails and PAH templates. One sticking point is that the PAH email template is currently wrong as we do window and phone sales out of two Modes of Sale, and that template is tied to MOS, so we're thinking of having a separate set of Window and Phone MOS for rentals. We virtually never do sales of our season and rentals in the same order, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem, just making sure the cashiers can switch quickly based on the requested event.
Joshua,
In general, our practice is similar to that of Gawain. For publicly ticketed events, it is required that it goes through our Box Office and sold on our website. And, again similarly, if they are attending something on our campus, we view them as our customers as well. What we will NOT do is include them in any of our direct marketing pieces until such time as they have a direct interaction with OUR organization; attending a rental event on our campus does not "count", per se.
For data, the rental client may ask for all patron contact information and sales information they want; it IS their event. We provide them as excel spreadsheets, generally (we definitely do NOT offer them access to Tessitura). For internal data separation, the Box Office has access to everything, they have to be able to do that. None of our Marketing/Events/Development departments have access to any rental data; this is all done via control groups. Finance has access to everything, again, that is needed.
We literally use the same ticket design for ALL events, so we have no worries there. We use the same MOSes and everything. Again, like Gawain, generally no issues with packages and single tickets as those are sold separately, and we never have a rental who sells packages.
Feel free to ask if you have other questions. Best of luck!
John A. Moskal II