Our 10-week Festival is scheduled to begin on June 10. Typically this time of year, I have to send the data files over to our printer by mid-April in order for everything to be in homes by mid-May. Of course, with COVID-19, this timeline isn't realistic and we are prepared to not make a decision about the Festival until mid-May or even later, depending on the rules of the city as we perform in Millennium Park. The entire Festival may happen, we may cancel part of it, there may be different concerts all together for some of the weeks, the whole Festival may be canceled. I clearly can't mail out packets to subscribers until this is decided. To buy us some more time, we are looking to work with the Network to move towards e-mail subscription packets. Our goal would be to mass-deploy e-mails to our patrons who have e-mail addresses on file, contact the ones who don't by phone to acquire their e-mail address, or offer the ability to pick up their packet at the first concert.Each e-mail would hopefully include a subscription letter, a subscriber handbook and a mobile composite barcode for our subscribers who have every concert. We would also need to do a version that would include individual tickets for those who have our smaller packages, ranging from 4-13 concerts per seat/package. We do have the ability to scan mobile devices at our venue.Has anyone else been thinking about moving in this direction or started the process? Any gotchas I haven't been thinking about? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks!
Kari, you seem to be 14 days ahead of me here. Would love to have a status report if you've learned anything outside this posting.
We are still in the process of accepting subscription orders and seating everyone, but we did convert our physical renewal packet mailing to email. It didn't have tickets in it, so I can't speak to that hurdle. Our renewal packets include 3 pieces: a letter (which varies by segmented groups of subs), our brochure, and a "Subscriber Profile" (personalized details of what each HH purchased the previous year). Sending the letter and brochure via email was very easy. The tricky part was the Profiles. Normally, those are created as a Word merge, but we adapted that template to a Wordfly email and linked it to an output set with custom Attributes where we track subscriber information. It ended up being pretty slick! We still mailed some physical packets to those without emails or who didn't open the email. We also resent the email to people who didn't open it the first time.
Hi John! Sorry for my delayed reply. I was hoping I would have more answers by now.So many things are still up in the air for us, so we are moving towards requiring members to either pick up their subscription packet at their first concert, or accept it digitally. We are still in the testing phase of this but our plan for now is:1) Send out a survey to all patrons as described above, call those we don't hear from or whose e-mail we don't have.2) If we are unable to reach them, their default is to pick up their packet at their first concert.3) Make sure printing is turned off for all packages/performances.4) Adjust the orders for those who request digital delivery to PAHT delivery (previously mail)5) For those who choose e-mail delivery, everyone will receive a personalized Wordfly e-mail with dynamic data content specific to their package. At this time, Wordfly is unable to generate a barcode for us to insert into the e-mail and it hasn't been done before. This e-mail letter will also explain that, similar to PAHT, the patron will receive a follow-up e-mail that includes their ticket(s).6) For our members who have the same seats for every concert, they will receive one composite barcode to use, for the entire season. For those who have multiple concerts, we THINK / PLAN / ARE TESTING that they will receive one e-mail with multiple concerts/barcodes attached but we have't worked that part out yet. We are creating a new PAHT design for all of this as well. 7) Once everything is finalized and ready to go, we will turn on printing for all packages and it will generate and deploy the PAHTs.That is about as far as we have gotten... although, as you know, this is all an idea we are working towards, and yet who knows. I would also recommend reaching out to Joe Fernicola at Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as we were just discussing his ideas over what to do for the fall.
Hi Kari!We've been thinking about doing something similar to this, so this thread has been very helpful! I was wondering if you had considered how any ticket exchanges might affect this, if at all? We were looking at doing physical cards instead of sending individual tickets, but ran into the issue of exchanges being difficult and had to go back to the drawing board.