Greetings Tessiturians,
I'm throwing this out to garner the hive mind wisdom. We are looking at printing a membership card for our highest level donors. We would like to have on this membership card, a bar code. We would like that bar code to be able to be used for donor lounge entry; to hold their ticket purchases; to send a CSI upon entry; and possibly send an email to let our Devo team know said donor is at the show. The caveat to this is we are not currently on V12.1.
Are any of you creative people out there doing any of this functionality on 12.0.3 or lower? If so, do you have it set to be able to transition to 12.1? It would be awesome if you would share your pros and cons of this format.
Best,
Christopher Cuhel, Lyric Opera of Kansas City
Just from the technical logistics side of things, the bar code is likely going to be only one single piece of data -- most likely a constituent ID, or MAYBE a membership ID if you want these things to expire and be reissued with every membership period. I would probably suggest constituent ID as the less broken option.
Everything else you do would be contextual based on this one point of data. The sky's the limit with custom code, of course; but out of the box you could use this to search for your members on any screen that accepts a constituent ID (with scanner sentinels). For more customized and automated solutions, you'd want to logically check the customer_no for an active membership and then go from there.
Hi Christopher,
In a previous life, I set up members with member cards that had their Tess constituent ID, with a C prefix. This was used to scan them in to events, using a customised version of the Special Access Area functionality in N-SCAN, although I believe that this is now standard and does not require a customisation.
We didn't use any CSI or email notifications, but email notifications are a normal part of N-SCAN, so if you are using that, you could probably get that up and running easily.
Having the barcodes with a prefix, and a set number of leading zero's was also useful in capturing the card numbers outside of Tessitura environments, such as the restaurant. if you embark on this, I would highly recommend doing this from the start. Eg: If the constituent ID was 1234, the barcode could be C00001234, so each barcode was the same length.
This was all on v11.
Best of luck, scanning patrons is very fun and gives a looks cool to boot!