We were wondering if other organizations have come up with a way to verify on their website whether someone is actually a student or faculty type before offering them a lower price for tickets? Or did you decide it wasn't worth the effort?
We could use the honor system or possibly ask for a student ID at the door or at will call. But we don't want to cause a lot of extra time waiting in line. Not asking for the ID could encourage fraud.
We have spoken briefly with Tessitura consulting about the possibility of building a process, maybe that would run on a nightly basis, that would grab a list of valid students from a database, and then update the constituency or ranking in Tessi based on this. It is possible to do, I just wonder if it would be worth the time and effort involved.
Any insight would be appreciated.
Phil
we have a student sales program. They log into the website using a promo-code and are given the discounted price type (via offers - not MOS).
Part of the checkout process on the website is that they enter the Student ID and School Name. I have the API create an Association to a generic account name Student Sales and the Student ID / School info is entered as a note on the Assocation. The only fulfillment choice is Print at Home or Will Call. Print at Home sends them a specially created voucher with a barcode that we created. The barcode is ST-ORDERNUMBER (whatever the order number is).
The voucher very clearly states in big bold letters "THIS IS NOT A TICKET" - they go to the box office to redeem the voucher for their tickets. The scanners at the box office window have been programmed to recognize barcodes begining with 'ST' as student sales - when scanned, it sends the order number and brings up their account, then the scanner sends a keyboard shortcut to bring up the Constituent record and another keyboard shortcut to bring up the Association. The box office employee should see a generic Student Sales assocation with the user ID and school name. If the ID presented matches what is in the Assocation, they are legit and the employee makes a real assocation to the school (for Marketing / tracking, promotional purposes) and then fulfills the ticket(s).
We thought about the student database thing, but we have around 20+ colleges locally and hundreds of high school / middle schools. It would be a logistical nightmare and until there is a big brother type educational database with an exposed API it wouldn't work for us.
Good luck!