Now I understand going in that not a lot of people might have any insight into this but I'm taking my chances.
We are in our first season since conversion from ProVenue. We sell subscriptions for our seasons, but our subscriptions are very flexible. The only requirement for getting a subscription is to purchase tickets to 4 different performances. There are no other restrictions in regards to how many tickets they have to get or the types of shows they have to get. And unless they have made the necessary donations, they are not guaranteed the same seats for every performance. We found we would be unable to use the flex package function in Tessitura since during training our consultants told us the system will not allow shows within a package to have a different number of tickets. So when we sell a subscription, the cashiers must simply know that once the order reaches 4 events, they must change the price type to the season subscription price type. Through rankings and TNEW customizations we have made it possible to buy a season package or additional season tickets on the web.
However, during our summer session where we only accept season orders, we want to be able to accept a season order online, but we cannot seat the order when the order is placed since we have a very intricate donor system, and these donors have a certain amount of time to submit their orders for priority seating in advance of non-donors who may have also submitted their order ahead of them. We currently take order forms in May but wont start filling them until June and it usually takes the whole summer to catch up on filling the specific orders.
We are hoping to be able to use non-seated online orders with our current customization so that they can submit the order but seats assigned later. We do not currently use the unseated function, all MOS require every show to be seated before finishing.
Our worries are that we wont be able to keep up with the online orders, or might miss one as we are actually seating them. Or people will purchase tickets to a show that will then sell out before we seat their order. We may also be selling dance recitals or rental events online as seated orders but want to make sure they don't accidentally get submitted as unseated.
Does anyone have any experience with selling subscriptions as single tickets and selling unseated orders online?
Jesse,
Our organization also uses priority seating level based on renewal status and/or donor level. We have had a lot of success using unseated methods. A few questions: 1) Are your subscriptions particularly strong, that is, how hypothetical is the possibility that a show would sell out on a subscription basis? 2) Are you currently set up to have any staff members blind copied on e-mail confirmations that go out? 3) Do you have anyone on staff that can run a pull directly from the database using the SQL server?
Since you are not using the package function, locating the unseated orders is as simple as using the order search function with seated = No for performances within the given date range. Also, if the box office manager and/or supervisors are set to receive blind copies of all e-mail confirmations that go out, that can also help you to keep track of orders to make sure none slip through the cracks. You can then also forward those to additional Box Office staff members as means of more easily assigning the task of seating each order.
If you have someone in the database, they can, as frequently as necessary, do a simple pull to determine how many unseated sub line items you have for each given performance, though that was never actually a worry for us, so there may be better ways of watching that number. As for policing the seated vs. unseated functionality via the website, unless I am mistaken, that will essentially be purely in the hands of whoever manages your website, but it can be done.
I hope that helps.
John
Thanks for the reply John. That actually makes a lot of sense and I think that could work really well.
We were thinking of using the batch detail report, but having the actual confirmation email would be even better. We however, have not figured out how to blind copy email confirmations to my email or the managers email.Couldn't find any documentation on how to do it either?
Another one of our concerns was, when an unseated online order is submitted for a particular show, does that mean that it is holding back that number of seats from that price zone, or are they not considered until they are actually seated. It is rare but does happen every few years for some shows to sell out completely during subscription sales. However, it is a guarantee every year that some orders received later in the summer will get bumped to a cheaper price section because of availability for the more popular shows. Hypothetically, if someone reserved the last 2 seats in price zone 1 but the order hasn't been seated, and we get a donor order after they submit theirs, will be be able to give those last 2 seats to the donor even though there is an order with that price zone that hasn't been seated?
Regarding the e-mail confirmations, you may want to confer with whoever runs your organization's e-mail server because there are multiple ways of configuring this, especially if you wish for more than one person to receive blind copies, but it is simple enough elsewise. There is a line in system tables in T_DEFAULTS called ORDER_EMAIL_BCC and you should be able to enter the e-mail addresses right there for whoever should be receiving those separated by commas. For our organization, we keep the BCCs to supervisors only.
Regarding zones, unseated line items do not hold a count, so you could possibly oversell a zone. If you are willing to offer slight refunds and re-seat in other zones, that should not matter too much (unless you want to keep the money anyway and use editable pricing to make less expensive zones work, but we have always offered slight refunds for these few instances); it is just a matter of communicating that to the patrons and then making sure you honour your priority list. I mentioned someone in the database in my previous post, that person (if he/she exists) could also easily assist in keeping an eye on these counts.