Bulk print gift certificates - Event Cancellation Utility

Hi Katherine Beaulieu (Past Member) - 

If you use an email marketing application such as Wordfly, Mail2/Prospect2, or MailChimp, you can export the information from Tessitura (email address and gift certificate number) and email it to members in bulk, merging the GC_no field into the email. 

There are a couple ways to get this information out of Tessitura -

1. The Event Cancellation Utility can save the results of a run to a CSV, and that can include the email and GC_no. 

2. You can still use the Batch GC Print Utility to mark them as printed and export the results to CSV, which you could have include email address as well. https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Help_System_v151/Content/Gift%20Certificates/Batch%20Printing%20Gift%20Certificates.htm

Lastly, in the next service pack being released in the next day or so (15.1.9/15.0.16) there will be a bulk HTML Email utility that will allow you to bulk send things like this with HTML templates. If that is an option, keep your eyes open for the announcement about 15.1.9/15.0.16 in the next 1-2 days (based on current progress). 

Thanks, 

Chris Szalaj

Tessitura Network

Thanks Chris Szalaj This is a great idea!

We are now running into the issue where patrons have multiple gift certificates (up to 6) as they had multiple orders, or performances that were cancelled. Ideally we want to combine these into 1 gift certificate for ease of use. 

I looked at expiring the gift certificates (with the gift certificate expiration utility) and putting the money on account to combine the value, but then we have no way to re-issue the gift certificates en masse...I've scoured the network for any solution and I've seen the question come up a few times but with no solution. Does anyone know of a way to bulk issue gift certificates from $ on account or merge multiple gift certificates?

Thanks, 

Katherine

Hi Chris SzalajIs there a way to exclude certain gift certificates from being printed in the Batch Gift Certificate Print Utility? We are using this utility in the way suggested in option 2 above (saving as CSV and sending through WordFly) in order to send gift certificates to patrons who opt to have their cancellation funds applied to a gift certificate. The problem we are running into is that if someone purchases a gift certificate online, they are also showing up in this report. When a gift certificate is purchased on our website, the PDF of the gift certificate is sent automatically but the gift certificate is not marked "printed" in Tessitura. We have been manually reviewing the report every week to remove anyone who already received their gift certificate but would love to find a way to automate.

Thanks
Jess Levy
San Francisco Opera

I made a pretty Gift Cert template in wordfly and an Output set that does up to two gift certificate numbers.  I bulk emailed the first quarter and am now about to do the next.

The thing I loved most about it was that it was a background image with words on the top of it (like our pdfs) and it worked on Outlook for desktop as well with some cool coding I stole and modified - email nerd stuff

Hi Katherine Beaulieu (Past Member) - getting back to your question above - we released a utility in 15.1.11/15.0.18 to move money from on account to other payment methods - such as gift certificates. Hopefully that helps with bulk issuing GCs from on account money. This is not a way to merge multiple gift certificates in bulk - that needs to be done manually on a certificate-by-certificate basis. 

Hi Chris Szalaj

We did end up merging them manually. For future cancellations we figured out a way to segment out patrons who had multiple GC and process them all at once. 

Does the On Account Funds Disbursement Utility have the ability to move money from one on account payment method to another? That is our newest challenge as we have hundreds patrons with funds on account spanning 2 fiscal years that we would like to combine.

Hi Jess Levy, unfortunately there is not. I entered an enhancement that would allow a GC to be marked printed when purchased and emailed via the API so that it would be excluded from the Batch Print function. There may be a way to identify GCs purchased via a web batch, and to subsequently mark them printed so they don't get scooped up with the utility - this would be a custom job though as a bridge until we have functionality to actually mark them printed when purchased via the web. 

Thanks

Chris

Thanks for the update. We will continue to monitor for these manually.

Hi Katherine Beaulieu (Past Member) - this isn't a function of the new utility, it doesn't move money between On Account payment methods. 

Hi Chris Szalaj - another question around gift certificate functionality from me.

I see from your response to Katherine that there's no way to bulk merge multiple gift certificates for a customer.  Just want double check that manual is the only option for this?

The use case we have is that we have just extended our gift certificate expiry date for anyone whose certificate was issued between 1 Jan 2020 - 23 Aug 2020 to 31 Dec 2021.  We have been using this functionality to issue credit vouchers for cancelled shows as opposed to on account funds, as until recently on account money could not be used on TNEW.  We would like to email everyone impacted to remind them of their certificate number and balance remaining, as well as give them their new expiry date.  We have about 150 customers who have multiple gift certificates that this would apply to, due to them purchasing for multiple shows, and as opposed to having to send them multiple emails with each voucher number, or trying to figure out how to send one email with multiple voucher numbers in the body of the email (we're on Wordfly), we were hoping we could consolidate the vouchers they have into one.  As mentioned above, I'm taking it from your previous response that this would not be possible without going into each constituent in ticket order entry and manually merging, so wanted to double check I'm not missing something else obvious as to another way that we could manage this process.

Thanks,
Rathi