Hi there!
Here at Ogunquit Playhouse we are looking to streamline our process for gathering/emailing Gift Certificate purchases. Right now, we use the Gift Certificate Listing Report for Constituent/GC information, but found we have to pull a separate list in order to get the constituent's email addresses. We then combine the report with the list, in excel, to get all of the information on one spreadsheet, so that our Marketing team can email the Gift Certificates out via Wordfly. Before we send Marketing this excel document, we then have to cross-reference the list with our open CSI's, to ensure we include the note from the purchaser ("Happy Birthday, Joe") and add this to the excel doc. Once we've done each of these steps, we then send it over to Marketing for emailing.
We're wondering how other theaters are handling Gift Certificate sales, specifically mailing processes, during the pandemic? Are you offering to send GC's to only the purchaser, or do you offer to send to the recipient, as well? What process do you use, or do you have suggestions for us on our current process? Unfortunately, we haven't figured out how to pull all the information we need in one place (one report, one list, etc.) but here are the data points we're trying to extract:
Looking forward to discussing!
Thank you,Morgan GavaletzTicketing Service ManagerOgunquit PlayhouseOgunquit, Maine
We upgraded our email order confirmations to include the gift certificate information for the patrons, which means that they get it right away when they purchase on our website or when our reps send them their email confirmations. The set up to do this can be found through Tessitura on this blog: https://www.tessituranetwork.com/en/Items/Articles/Web-Products/2018-11-29-Gift-Certificates It has really streamlined the process for us.
One way you could streamline your process would be to use the Gift Certificate Batch Printing Utility in the Ticketing Processing folder. When this report is run and saved to CSV, it includes all the info on your list except the notes from the CSI. This is a utility, which means it can change data in your system; specifically, it can optionally mark the gift certificate as printed so that it is excluded the next time you batch print any unprinted gift certificates. You can control this behavior with the Update Selected Rows parameter. I encourage you to check out the documentation on this utility and run it in your Test system to see if it might work for you.
Thank you, Michael! I'll run this by our System Admin!
I'm playing with gift certificate delivery by saving the Form Field data to a local table rather than a CSI. That data is then extractable in an output set to WordFly (similar to WF abandoned cart) and can be scheduled for WordFly to batch send them daily. They can choose the email address to deliver the GC to, a message (if any), with the To and From fields being whatever they like.