We are currently selling digital performances. When patrons purchase a digital performance they currently need to log into Tnew and navigate to their account to watch. With the holidays around the corner we have had many patrons who would like to gift digital performances. There is currently no way to purchase a streaming performance as a gift on Tnew. If you purchase a performance it goes into the account you are logged in as. If patrons call in we have been ordering the performances under the recipients account, but sometimes our patrons do not know the recipients street address or email required to create and account, therefore we are losing out on business.
Has anyone else experienced this? What are some ways we can make it easier for our patrons to gift digital performances? I am curious to know how other organizations have handled this.
Thank You!
You could send the link to the performances in their email confirmations, which they could then forward on to the recipient. It's not gated, but that's one way to make it easier. You would just add the link in system tables under LTR_TNEW_DYN_EMAIL_CONTENT
We just worked out a process for this ourselves. We aren't TNEW users, so forgive me if some of this is different for you - but we used a Message pricing rule in the purchase path to prompt people 'if this is a gift, please provide the recipient's name and email address in the comments box' - when we find one of those notes in Package Order Listing/Single Sales Order Listing, we set up an account for the recipient and transfer the order over to that new account, keeping the purchaser as the initiator on the order. We also aren't using our PAH functionality for anything else at the moment, so we repurposed it into a gift receipt - we designed a PAH ticket that says "you've received XXXX as a gift!" and has all the streaming instructions on it and we send it to the initiator/the buyer to pass on to the owner/recipient whenever they want them to receive the gift.
We are in the same boat. We are on TNEW.
We have two solutions for this:
1) A specific digital gift certificate that can be loaded up with the value of the performance. The patron purchases it, gifts it to their loved ones, and they can use it to redeem into a digital performance under their own account. We are generally telling patrons if they want to purchase ten (10) and under to do it this way. We just launched this online because our Box Office has been inundated with requests. It's clunky though because given the variable nature of a gift certificate value, patrons can't purchase more than one at a time. We have messaging and buttons in the Cart that will push them back to the gift certificate page should they need to purchase multiples. We also don't have an elegant way to distribute the gift certificates. Right now the patron just gets a list and its up to them to manage the numbers. Fine for one or two, but could get unwieldy.
2) For patrons who want to purchase more than 10 or for companies who would like to purchase digital performances in bulk, we have asked them to call into our Box Office. Our Box Office staff will transact into a specific group sales dummy performance so that they can select the number of tickets that the patron/organization requires. This also allows us to do some sales reporting (digital gift certificates can be tricksy to report on) Then we create a unique pricing rule for each patron/company with unique promo code that is embedded in a specific link. The pricing rule flips the standard price type to a comp for the quantity that they have purchased. This link (with directions) are sent to the patron to distribute. Their customer can then redeem online and create their own account/order. No muss, no fuss. There is a small risk of the link being shared on social media, but we have monitoring in place so we can let the patron know should it get out of hand. But overall, people seem to be behaving themselves.
The pricing rule is a super manual process in terms of setup, but it does the job. And it is very, very easy for our patrons.
Kristine
Kristine,
Thank you for your insight. I will share this information with my Marketing team. Many thanks!
We are also on TNEW and going the GC route:
We have a separate Gift Certificate page set up with messaging regarding gifting a digital concert. We added a purchase instruction and pricing rule cart message "want to gift this concert?" to the digital performances which directs to the GC page.
We recommend purchasing each gift certificate separately if gifting multiples as we have added images to our GC email so the patron can forward the email to the recipient. There is also a link in the GC email to a "how to redeem" document we put together to help the recipient.
It's not a perfect system, but we have seen good uptake on the gift option!
Hello, we at the Boston Symphony Orchestra are gifting digital performances now with the help of the L2 Interactive Donate2/Stream2 product. They spearheaded a quick turnaround for us, as we were desperate to come up with a solution. Patron requests coming to the BSO for gifting has been extremely high. We aren't TNEW, but I don't think that matters for this. What happens on the gifting form: The purchaser buys the gift, and the order comes into Tessitura for the gift recipient on the price type/performance that we associate with the donate2 form. Everything happens instantaneously. The gift recipient can log in right away and start watching after resetting their account password if they are new to us. The purchaser and the gift recipient both receive custom emails that go out right away. Those emails have the Tess order #, the purchaser's gift message. In tessitura, via CSI we collect all the other information that is needed as well if we have to troubleshoot. I'd recommend seeing how the form works on our website. Feel free to message me for more info. Happy to talk more about how L2 Interactive integrated this for us.
We have setup essentially the same process as Kristine, and are also on TNEW. I agree that the gift certificate process is clunky for people wanting more than a couple of tickets, and the pricing rules take quite a bit of setup! But it was the best solution we could find for the moment. I am anticipating that we may have a lot of unredeemed gift certificates when our holiday program ends, and will have to decide how to handle any return requests.