Is anyone experimenting with offering a gift certificate bonus if people choose to take a GC rather than a refund for cancelled/postponed programs? We've seen some non-Tess orgs offering this, such as TodayTix and some of the Broadway ticket providers, but would like to hear more about the response.
1. Are people enthusiastic/responsive?
2. Are you offering it to both subscribers and single ticket buyers? If only to certain audience groups, have you received push back from any other audience groups?
3. Have you automated this process or do you have to have your box office staff issue the bonuses manually?
Hello Erin,
We have not considered bonus GC's, however, I would like to give some suggestions if you implement it.
1. You would need to use a payment method to increase (bonus amount) the amount of returned money going to a GC. I would suggest a new payment method with a name that clearly self-identifies it's purpose. This way your Finance can easily track the usage of the payment method.
2. If you want to accurately track your Gift Certificates SOLD and not count these refund/bonus gift certificates that are really refunds, then you either need to create a new GC payment method or create a new payment method that uses the same GL as your GC's and use it as an offset.
2a. If you chose the new GC payment method, make sure the they clearly identify themselves as a different payment method on the card itself. This is so your staff can chose the correct payment method when redeeming them. If your staff selects the wrong GC payment method, the system will lock it within an order. Your staff would need to close their batch to release it. We have this issue, so I hope you can avoid it.
2b. If you chose to use a new offset payment method (type = other or cash), it would need to use the same GL as your regular GC's use. To use it as an offset you add a positive and a negative amounts equal to the amount of the GC and Finish the order. It has no net effect on the order and no net effect on the GC GL. In a Fiscal Year, lets say you sell 20k in GC's (technically, -20K) and have 1K in these offsets (technically a +1K and a -1K), your true net sales in GCs would be 20K - 1K = 19K. This method can also be used to offset GC's sold by mistake (and you return it), GCs sold in incorrect amounts, and GC's used for Marketing purposes. You can also build this into your GC Analytics so that it subtracts the offset amount for you.
Neil
Thanks for the info Neil - we've done a bonus GC promotion for Black Friday sales before, so we have the payment methods set up and usable, but that's always been something like 40 or 50 orders, a small enough amount that our staff can track and process the bonuses manually - nothing like what we're anticipating with Covid changes. We were hoping someone might have found a way to automate the process so it could be scaled.
We're also thinking about only doing this for single ticket buyers - for our subscribers, we're discussing a voucher system where the tickets they're currently holding can just be exchanged on a ticket-for-ticket basis rather than dollar-for-dollar - in our eyes, that's a better value b/c our ticket prices change frequently, so the GC might not stretch as far even with the bonus when someone goes to rebook - but that's kind of insider baseball stuff and we're worried about whether subscribers will see the value the same way or if they'll be upset they weren't offered the same promotion as the single ticket buyers - so, if anyone has insight on this (or any other offers that you've targeted to subs vs non-subs!), we'd like to hear what the response was!