Hello all,
So, our marketing is looking at creating an offer that has to be redeemable online as well as over the phone that is you get to use $25 Gift Cert as a gift from our organization towards any show for our current/next season.
Now we can't do negative fee cause they don't exist.
We can create the "gift certs" in Tessitura by creating them in these patrons accounts and paying them off with a "dummy payment type" that we would create just for this. However, the issue will be when they patron uses the gift cert that money would then hit the shows that the patron purchases with. This in all the reporting would create an overstatement on the show. We can't going to all of the reports canned and custom to "ignore" these gift certs and the money that's attached to them.
Promo codes won't work either because we don't know how many tickets they will purchase and depending on that there would be an unforeseeable number of price types needed to find the combo that would give the "$25 off".
Now, of course - I've been charged with finding a way to make this happen.
Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas? Is there something I'm not thinking through?
Thanks in advance.
JEFF
I don't know that this would necessarily cover your concern about "overstated" income, but the one time our marketing dept wanted to basically give free gift certs to certain people, we used a payment method tied to a marketing expense GL and marketing did in fact purchase the gift certs. It wasn't so much a dummy payment method as an actual means of charging the department directly. In our case it was a very small number of people, and I'm guessing that's not the case for you, but at the time that was the tidiest solution we came up with. We also had some concerns about rules related specifically to gift certificates; and because we were already tied to using the term "gift certificate", it was deemed important that it be an actual gift certificate and not a flat discount being called a gift certificate, but that's largely because gift certificates cannot expire in California and you may not have that issue.
Well, editable pricing is probably the best solution, but to make it work on the web is going to take some web coding customizations. There is no API method that handles the conditional editing of a price (and even if there was you would have to code your website to use it). You would have to code your website to edit the price appropriately when a promo code is entered. For most organizations, though, adding something like this to your website is probably not feasible, at least not for a quick turnaround or a onetime experiment. If it is feasible for you, though, I think it would work pretty nicely. It would definitely work in the box office.
I think the only way to do it on the web without making alterations to the coding of your website is with gift certificates. If you created a gift certificate payment method just for this, you could give it a new GL, making it easy to sort out the money on the finance side, but as you said, the sales reports are going to count that as money received. I don’t think I see any way around that though if you want to make this work on the web without doing some coding on your website.
Kevin Sheehan
Documentation & Learning Resources Specialist
Tessitura Network
1 888 643 5778 ext 329 Office
ksheehan@tessituranetwork.com
We are doing something similar to what Amanda was talking about with Development. If someone becomes a new member a portion of the membership will be placed on account and the Box Office will pay for a Coupon Event. We decided not to use a performance instead of a Gift Certificate so that we can put a limit on when it can be redeemed and track it very easily like we would any other event. Then we'll just exchange the Coupon Event into their order. We thought about using an Internal Expense, but this way worked better for us.
We’ve just been ruminating on this here (fun Friday afternoon brain teaser, thanks, Jeff!) and we came to the same conclusion as Amanda. Marketing would have to “pay” for the gift certificates using a dummy payment method. You’d still have to do some manual working with the income numbers, however.
My only other thought—and this would be a bit of a quick fix and possibly confusing on the web side of things—would be to create an offer for $25 off that is limited to one ticket (provided your website pays attention to that parameter). The patron would then have to put the one ticket in their cart and continue shopping for each additional ticket at full price.
-p.
PATRICK SCHLEY | Marketing & Sales Manager | Milwaukee Repertory Theater Patty & Jay Baker Theater Complex | 108 East Wells Street | Milwaukee, WI 53202 414.290.0710 tel | 414.224.9097 fax | pschley@milwaukeerep.com Website: www.milwaukeerep.com | Facebook: www.facebook.com/milwrep | Twitter: twitter.com/milwrep
I recently dealt with a similar question at a new implementation where certain customers were offered a $50 per-order discount. Because the discount was not tied to any specific package, price type or number of tickets, it would have been unwieldy to build discounts for all possible prices, so we dealt with it by using a payment method tied to a GL used specifically for tracking that credit. It does mean that the sales reports show money received for those subscription tickets, but by having a dedicated GL it is easy on the finance reports to show how much of that received money is the credit or discount.
Jonathan
Using the payment method as an option presents a number of challenges beyond reporting. It inflates the ticket value, which in some areas may present tax/legal ramifications.
Also, be cautious when offering refunds or exchanges that you don’t mistakenly credit the patron with the amount of the discount! If a patron bought a $100 ticket discounted $25.00 by a “payment”, the order will still reflect a $100.00 ticket.
-Ryan
From: Tessitura Ticketing Forum [mailto:forums-ticketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Jonathan Smillie Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 4:47 PM To: Ryan Creps Subject: Re: [Tessitura Ticketing Forum] Gift of $25 towards any purchase - How to do it?
From: Jeffrey Cass <bounce-jeffreycass4713@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 7/9/2010 2:52:59 PM
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