We are planning for our 21-22 season (hopefully) but know that not everyone will be ready to come back. We would like to offer some type of grace period or deferral but are looking for best practices around allowing subscribers to skip a season and keep their seats for the following season. Are you allowing subscribers to skip? If so, are you charging some type of deposit (applicable to the next season or not?) Are you allowing subscribers to just decide to skip a season for free and if so, are you concerned about holding their seats and then they do not return for the next season? Are you allowing other subscribers an opportunity to upgrade or are you imposing a moratorium on upgrades for the upcoming season? Do you have a mechanism for subscriber to contact you to request the deferral or are you assuming all non-renewed subscribers should be given the grace period? And technically in Tessitura, how are you holding onto the base seats for rollover the following year? Or are you planning on just rollover from 19-20 again? I welcome and appreciate all discussion around this issue as we begin to develop our policies and procedures around this subject.
Hi Elizabeth,
While we don't promote the option to put a subscription on sabbatical for a year, this is a practice we employ internally on a case-by-case basis. We don't hold seats for a subscriber for more than one season without renewing, however, unless they are a major donor/very specific reason.
What we do is we have created a price type called Sabbatical for packages that has a $0 price. We change the price type of the subscription to Sabbatical, print the package, then return the seats on the individual performance line item levels. This way, the subscriber's seats are held/maintained in the base map, but are now available for sale on the individual performance level.
Then, when doing your rollover the following season, just make sure to include Sabbatical as a source price type in your rollover price map.
Hope that helps!
Michelle
That's a wonderful solution! Thank you for sharing it!
We allowed our Subscribers to skip a year without penalty. We figured it was a way to build audience good-will and alleviate additional pressure/stress during an already stressful and scary time (globally!). We intend to Rollover seating from 2019 into 2022 (when we hope to be "back to normal"). For 2021, we had a good feeling we wouldn't be in our indoor Playhouse auditorium, so we allowed subscribers to renew, but did not perform a rollover from 2020 to 2021 - we were not sure what the seating would even look like! Not performing a rollover put more work on our Box Office staff to check what subscription package/seating the guest had in 2019 and booking it as a single ticket, in a dummy performance (using our indoor seatmap for the time being). Our dummy performances represented each subscription day/time we sell and the performance cost was the total price of the subscription - we have 23 packages so I made 23 performances, plus an additional dummy performance for "new subscribers." We did not allow guests to "change/upgrade" their seating, but they could request a change (managed via CSI's), which we will consider only after we reseat all subscribers in our new/outdoor facility, in seats comparable to what they would have had in our Playhouse/indoor auditorium. For those who chose not to renew, our message has been "you will not lose your seats" and our Box Office team explained that we are treating 2021 as a "one-off," with hopes that we'll be back to business as usual in 2022.
As for communication with our guests: we sent a number of emails reminding guests of our renewal deadline and in those emails we provided the guests with our phone number, as well as our Box Office email address, so they could choose to call or email if they were not renewing. For those we hadn't heard from, we reached out to them first via phone, then = email. For anyone else we never reached or still hadn't head from, we sent a snail-mail letter, one month prior to our deadline, reminding them to renew. If we haven't heard back from them after these multiple contact attempts, we assumed they were choosing not to renew.
Hope this helps!!
Best,Morgan