Hello Tessitura hive-mind.
We've been offering gift certificates through Tess for a couple of years now. I would like to find a solution for getting these into peoples hands or emails. Right now if someone buys one at our box office we hand them a hand written piece of paper with the number name and order number, plus the original amount, which is adjusted every time a new transaction is made against it, by hand. If they order online we send them a handwritten piece of paper with the information on it through regular mail, and only on Mondays, we let folks know it can be up to 14 days to receive their gift certificate, which is a long wait especially during the holiday season.
I'm looking for a solution where the person who buys the gift certificate immediately gets a PDF of the actual gift certificate via email, and that we can also generate the same PDF at the box office.
What solutions have you tried?
There is a shared utility on the Tessitura Network site from the Abbey Theatre that will take care of the PDF generation and emailing. There is a little bit of customization needed but it was not difficult to implement.
Our in-person or mailed gift certificates have always come out of Tessitura. Your payment method for your gift certificate is assigned a receipt type that will print out the gift certificate information on ticket stock. Prior to implementing the email delivery option, we had a CSI created for each online gift certificate purchased and each morning ran the standard CSI Tracking report to see what gift certificate orders we needed to print. All balances and updated gift certificates are handled in Tessitura.
We also print out our gift certificates as receipts. One problem we're running into is that I can't find a way to show the print status or these receipts, so I can't tell if the gift certificates were printed or not. Does your organization also have this problem?
For online orders, we would add a CSI action saying Gift Certificate Sent or make a note in the order comment. Was manual and could get overlooked, but worked for us.
I suppose you could use a User Defined Element on the Gift Certificate and have some code that would add the print date and time to the order somewhere.
Hi Autumn -
If you navigate to a constituent who has purchased a gift certificate, go to the Transactions tab, and then click on the Payments radio button, you can then click on the chicklet next to the gift certificate number to open the Gift Certificate Details Window. This shows the number of times the gift certificate has been printed, along with the date/time of the last printing.
This information is stored in the back end in the table T_GC, so you could also refer to it in a custom report if need be.
Thanks,
Patrick
We had Tessitura do a customization so we could do Print at Home gift certificates (as a PDF). Since this was implemented, 2/3 of our online gift certificate are done via PAH. For the gift certificates we print, we designed our gift certificate stock (on thermal plastic) with Boca and print them (a receipt design) with a dual Boca printer.
Adding to Patrick's comment, in our customization, the PAH gift certificates do not count as being printed. In other words, after the PAH sends, the print count remains at 0 (because it was not physically printed, it was sent via PDF).
Our online GC orders send us a CSI. We use the Customer Service Issue Tracking report to see our online GC orders. Then open the CSI, copy the GC number, go to our Transactions email (receives a copy of the order confirmation and PAH GCs), paste the GC number in the search box (Outlook), if it is a PAH we should see the order confirmation and the PAH GC. Finally, add an action of Gift Card - Print at Home, and close the CSI.
For online GC PAH orders, this takes maybe 1 minute to check the order and close the CSI.
For online orders that want to be mailed, we had Tessitura add a customization that adds a small mailing fee to an order with a GC. The PAH option is free (incentivizing PAH).
Magical - Thank you so much!