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!
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.