RSVP for Donor Events Online

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

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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

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

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