Hey Everyone!
I was just hoping to see if anyone had any insight on how or if people were doing online RSVP to donor events. Ideally we would want to collect any fee/donation amount for said event at transaction time. I don't think we want to go as far as use the ticketing module I don't think we are entirely against it though, it just seems like a bit overkill. Any suggestions or insights are appreciated.
Thanks!
Sean Pinto
We did this though it's not completely automated. Basically the way it works is the guest's donation gets recorded using the Contributions tab of Ticket Orders. Along with the contribution we have a CSI that is created with all the other information we need to collect (number of guests, guest names, etc...). Development then runs a CSI report and moves the information to the correct place in the History/Events tab. It's not perfect, but we highly prefer it to the old method of having to manually enter the contributions (which meant credit card numbers being printed off, etc...). If you'd like any more details please let me know! To the best of my, admittedly limited, knowledge Elevated Events themselves are not accessible to the web API so this seemed the best workaround.
We’ve offered a few donor events as ticketed events online. We have a couple of general admission houses that we use for this purpose. These events are in a season called “special events” and that keeps the ticketing out of regular box office reporting. If there is money to be processed, the ticket office opens the order, returns the seat, and puts the money on account for Dev to process. If the event is free, we run the performance seating book report to know who’s coming.
Actually, the ticketing module works pretty well for events—you can set them up so that the ticket price encompasses several components—and you can even receipt properly, with deductible and non-deductible amounts (although we haven’t done this in 5 years, so I can’t remember how we did this). An issue is that the money shows up in ticket history (if you want it to) and that it doesn’t show up on the Contributions tab.
Lucie Spieler
--------------------------------
IT Development and Training Manager
Editor, Season Program
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Florida Grand Opera
8390 NW 25th Street, Miami, FL 33122
Phone: 305-854-1643 x 1521
Fax: 305-856-1042
Ticket Office: 800-741-1010
www.fgo.org
Hi Sean,
We're using the ticketing module for most of our online donor events. However, we have taken some smaller event registrations for free events using customer service issues.
I'm eager to hear what you decide to do - this has been a challenge for us as well.
Good luck!
We found the biggest challenge with ‘special events’ such as donor events was not the ticketing or payment, but that there is always a varying array of information we need to collect for each event. It might be dietary requirements or hotel information, choices of breakout sessions, information about their organization or children, etc.
So we came up with the concept of integrating a Survey server with Tessitura. We found a very sophisticated but affordable product (less than $5K but cheaper if you have fewer people creating the surveys – we have about 50). It comes with Source Code and we found it easy to tie the survey software into our website and to our events and shopping cart. We also made the results of the surveys available in the Custom screens in Tessitura and via reports/lists/extractions. Finally, we’re able to link answers on specific questions to attributes or notes or constituencies, so the answers to the questions not only go into the survey data, but also directly into Tessitura data such as attributes.
To the customers, it looks as though they are just completing an online RSVP or registration form. But we now have great flexibility in creating whatever types of registration/rsvp forms we need, and tying that to elevated events/fees/activities in Tessitura and our shopping cart, without needing to do custom programming for every event.
We get the added bonus of also being able to use this for actual surveys! Finally, we actually issue various types of grants, so we’ve been able to leverage the system for online grant applications.
I’m happy to speak offline if anyone is interested, and I’ve offered to do a presentation at the conference this summer.
Alan
Alan C. Levine
Chief Information Officer
The John. F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
2700 F St NW
Washington, DC 20566
(202) 416-8688
aclevine@kennedy-center.org
twitter: @aclevine
www.kennedy-center.org
www.nationalsymphony.org
www.artsmanager.org
From: Tessitura Ticketing Forum [mailto:forums-ticketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Lucie Spieler Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 3:27 PM To: Levine, Alan Subject: RE: [Tessitura Ticketing Forum] RSVP for Donor Events Online
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Hi There:This may be a bit late, but Elevated Events might be a suitable way for you to handle this. It's a bit more complicated to collect funds, but fairly easy to set up otherwise. You can build an elevated event and promote it to a list (of your donors). Once promoted, you can distribute your list and patrons respond to your event. You can take table seating, guests names, etc. It was largely designed for this type of thing.
Best of luck!
Kindly,
Mark Sackett