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.
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.