Good Morning!
Due to the rest of our season being cancelled, there have been many ticket returns. We have been giving our patrons 3 options:
1. Donate tickets
2. Receive Box Office credit for a future performance
3. Refund tickets
Option 1 - Patrons receive an acknowledgement letter thanking them for the donation
Option 2 - Patrons receive our word that the money has been put on their account as credit
Option 3 - Patrons are notified that the refund will show in their bank account within 5-7 business days
As you can see, option 2 has no official communication to indicate the money is on their account as credit. Does Tessitura have the capability to issue Box Office credit receipts? Similar to ticket confirmation receipts, that can be sent to patrons automatically?
Thank you in advance for your help/feedback.
Hi Ellen! Miss you!
I'd consider offering people a credit in the form of a gift certificate. That is an easy way to give people a credit with "proof" (they get an email confirmation like they would when buying tickets that has the gift certificate number on it). They will also be able to use it online once things are on sale again, and will help the box office with call volume.
Would you or someone on your staff be able to create a HTML order confirmation? This Pop-Up Skill Builder Webinar a couple of weeks ago was helpful. https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Items/Videos/Webinars/2020/PopUpSkill_HTML_TemplatesYou should be able to use the Event Cancellation Receipt for this I would think.
Hi Jordan! Miss you too! Thanks for this reply, I've read a few forum posts about gift certificates and figured that would be the best option. Since we've already been putting money On Account as Box Office credit, I was hoping we wouldn't have to back track, oh well! I'll suggest it to Box Office to see if it would be doable.
We have also been putting ticket credit On Account rather than issuing gift certificates, just so we could have a bit more control of eligibility and expiration of those funds. Our creative solution to generate 'receipts' for that credit was to create an attribute that auto-calculates nightly with the value of a constituent's On Account balance for that particular payment method, and then we use a custom output set to bring that in as a dynamic value to Wordfly (we also set up attributes to crunch the value of donated tickets and refund amounts since COVID began). Then using Wordfly's conditional blocks we could set up a single email template that pulls in the various donation/credit/refund values and presents them neatly to a patron with instructions on how to use their credit, tax info for donations, and so on.
Yeah, just knowing staff skills, that would probably be the easiest way to do it. If all refunds haven't been processed yet, it might be worth looking into the event cancellation utility as well to process them in bulk. Tell box office to give me a shout if they want help processing anything. :)
Perhaps, we will look into this, thank you for the link!
That's clever!
Would you be willing/able to share the sql for the nightly calculation and the output set elements you used? I'd love to see the wordfly template too!
Will do! Yes, I saw that Event Cancellation Utility note post and already shared it with Chris. We'll see if anything comes of it. :)
Oh, very cool! I was planning on watching that webinar this afternoon! Can't wait to see what else is upcoming.
Hi Shelley!
Which webinar was it? I didn't have anything on my calendar yesterday. I'm realizing I may be having trouble keeping track of all of these Zooms and GTMs.
Thanks!
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Items/Videos/Webinars/2020/Network_Update_April_2020
Wow, how did I miss that!?! Thank you!!
We used Gift Certs for option 2 using the Event Cancellation Utility. We added a little bit of text to the HTML Template letting them know the T&Cs and also that a snazzy gift cert would be emailed to them. Once we had finished that productions credits I set up a WordFly email in the style of a Gift Cert and used an output set to load the data fields for the GC number, amount and expiry into the eDM template. I'm pretty happy with the results.