Access for Development to Ticket Sales?

Does anyone work of allocations for these departments?

I was thinking of investigating allowing development to purchase from an allocation on performances and train them in standard transactions. Currently we have holds on and they take calls from their patrons and then consult with the box office on seats/holds/transacting. The donor deals with the development team but the team deal with the box office. I think if allocations were applied then they could miss out the step with the box office, unless the patron had specific needs that fell outside of the allocated seats.

Lynn

Hi Dorothy:

Thank you!  That's an intersting solution as that's part of what our finance department is very concerned about.

Thank you!

Michelle

Hi Michelle,

I've trained all our development staff on how to enter ticket orders. However, they are not able to process payment transactions. When a donor calls them they can pick seats, give a discount, override fees, save an unpaid order and save a credit card to the donor's account. That way the donor feels special and the development department can manage that relationship well. Once the order is saved, the development officer lets someone in our box office know the order number and the box office charges the card. Then, our box office has all ticketing transactions in their batches and they are posted together and sent on to finance. Finance likes having all the ticket sales in one place, development likes managing the patron relationship, and the box office likes seeing every order at least briefly before they are fully processed. And our donors feel special. It's a little extra work, but everyone wins. 

Hope that helps,

Dorothy

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Does anyone work of allocations for these departments?

I was thinking of investigating allowing development to purchase from an allocation on performances and train them in standard transactions. Currently we have holds on and they take calls from their patrons and then consult with the box office on seats/holds/transacting. The donor deals with the development team but the team deal with the box office. I think if allocations were applied then they could miss out the step with the box office, unless the patron had specific needs that fell outside of the allocated seats.

Lynn

Hi Dorothy:

Thank you!  That's an intersting solution as that's part of what our finance department is very concerned about.

Thank you!

Michelle

Hi Michelle,

I've trained all our development staff on how to enter ticket orders. However, they are not able to process payment transactions. When a donor calls them they can pick seats, give a discount, override fees, save an unpaid order and save a credit card to the donor's account. That way the donor feels special and the development department can manage that relationship well. Once the order is saved, the development officer lets someone in our box office know the order number and the box office charges the card. Then, our box office has all ticketing transactions in their batches and they are posted together and sent on to finance. Finance likes having all the ticket sales in one place, development likes managing the patron relationship, and the box office likes seeing every order at least briefly before they are fully processed. And our donors feel special. It's a little extra work, but everyone wins. 

Hope that helps,

Dorothy

This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Ticketing Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Ticketing forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!