Do you sell via Ticketmaster (or another third party)? How do you get those sales into Tessitura and report back on them? How often do you do the import? How do you handle returns/reselling? I want to hear as much as you're willing to tell me.
Hi Maery
I guess it depends on what sort of reporting you need. I've done this a couple of times - at a previous organisation and at my current one. A (very) brief overview of the 2 scenarios:
Obviously, any reporting has to be custom. Sadly, there is no "out of the box" or elegant way of doing this. Oh, for me, this was a daily task.
Feel free to email me directly for more information if you'd like it. martin.keen@nida.edu.au
Martin
Hi Maery,
We have Tickets.com (for the time being) that the venue box office uses. This is the system that we had prior to Tessitura. We pull reports on daily sales that I combine with pivot reports on the same Excel sheet. To get the data into Tessitura I use Alteryx Designer approx. 2 hours before the performance. This way any exchanges can only be done at the venue if they originally sold the ticket and then by us only after the import has been completed and our representatives are at the venue. It also allows us to only use one scanner for all tickets no matter where the patron purchased.
Alteryx is still a program that I am learning but basically we run a report from tickets.com that includes the barcode for each individual ticket. I run the report through Alteryx that changes the format of the information to what Tessitura needs. It is looking for any patron records that are already in Tessitura (via the patron ID that is set up as an attribute). We pull a list from the back end that gives us our full data base to compare to. It compares phone numbers, names, and email addresses too.If it doesn't find any record we will do a constituent import first, re-pull the data base, and then run it through Alteryx again. Once it is a clean list, which can take a few cleanings and re-pulling of the data base, we then import it into Tessitura.
My predecessor did the programming in Alteryx for our first season (last year was our first on Tessitura and not on the same ticketing as the venue). We have a new venue this year so I will be learning it more in the next couple of months.
Hope this helps.
Sally
When I was working at my previous orgs (who are venues), similar to Martin, we had TM send the data in the right format for order import. We were able to get the emailed order file to auto save to a local drive for the scheduled Order Import Utility to be completed each morning. It would occasionally fail due to dodgy countries, states etc. These days we do daily imports from one main venue (they use Tessitura) and it's just as easy. They're self hosted so that's a factor.
In Analytics I do a gross look at 3rd parties by filtering (or break by) Import Price type Category or use a starred Filter set of any price type with the Ticketmaster code in it.Happy to talk further (email in bio).
Cheers,
H
Of course, the lovely wrinkle with any of this when using the Order Import utility is that any refunds/exchanges have to be processed manually as the Order Import utility can only process sales.
Glad to hear you were able to get the info from Ticketmaster in a usable format!
I'm not familiar with Alteryx at all, but this sounds promising. Is there any difficult with not seeing those Sales in Tessitura until two hours before the performance?
This is the big bummer. I'm going to have to take a look at how often we have refunds/exchanges from Ticketmaster and see if that amount of processing is feasible for our relatively small ticketing team before I make any decisions on this!
I've had some success with semi-automated imports before (mostly Contributions) so this sounds exactly like what I was imagining would work best! I love the idea of a gross look at 3rd party sales in Analytics.
We always got TM to request approvals for refund/exchange so we could return the tix. Then the exchange would come in in a new order. TM imports were pretty easy for us. The odd country code was kooky. Other 3rd parties were a bigger pain.