Hi all
A bit of an unrelated to Tessi question, but I'm hoping to get some ideas from those of you that build and manage tickets in Tessi on how you manage the workflow, particularly in a Museum environment. We have an 'event submission form' which our programs, marketing, education and other teams complete with event details and marketing content for an event page. This is submitted to us in the Tessitura team to build the performances in Tessi and T-New. There is inevitably quite an email chain between us, marketing, our web team and the event submitter which makes it hard to track what's what.
I'd like to implement some kind of job submission/workflow tool which allow our event submitters to complete what they need, forward to marketing to complete, then forward to us, with the ability to comment/question and reroute the job as necessary. I have used a basic Sharepoint workflow tool many years ago in another role, which is the sort of thing I have in mind, but I was really hoping to hear about how you guys all manage this process? Does anyone have any software or app recommendations?
Thanks in advance!
Similarly we get departments to submit one of a couple of forms to the ticketing dept with a week turn around. Application forms for education and artistic are essentially a GA performance with data fields captures into a CSI (or stored procedure if tricky), but we also have forms for standard builds. It's a trimmed down external hire form without the legal.
They are pdfs that we can save to SharePoint and log against our spreadsheet tracker which is ok as there are limited number of users and we all have a stand up every week between TKT/CRM/MKT/EDU. If the builds were spread out further we'd track the work flow using Trello.
Hi Tash,
This is Anne with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and I do the majority of ticket building and setup for our daily Admissions events, Special Exhibition Timed Tickets, Programs (Films, Art Classes, Lectures, Courses, Youth programs), Online events which we ticket through Tessitura for either Zoom platform or recorded content watched through a TNEW account, and a few other situations where we use Tessitura to track things.
We mostly use Trello as our main point of coordinating our requesting parties with our Tix Operations, Marketing, and our Creative team who manage our website and any other media we use. Because of needing to coordinate many players at various stages, we usually use a lead-time of no less than 7 weeks out from when they want to have tickets go onsale - which may sound like alot of time, but we find that often (more so with programs) that getting contracts lined up, etc. can be tricky and it is better to have more time to adjust than less. We use a system called Event Management Systems (EMS) which is managed through Accruent, that is our main space management system in the Museum for both public event spaces as well as meeting rooms, galleries, etc. and that is where we collect the majority of our programs info. Within this system, I have created specific resources associated with each type of event so that the programmers basically add their event info to the reservation which has their space reserved, and then I extract that to build the events in Tessitura. Sadly, it is not a system which allows us to import fields directly into Tessitura, but I've basically made corresponding selections which map to our facilities, price templates, etc. that help navigate the data into an event. For other events (like daily Admissions or Special Exhibits tickets, I've created my own build sheets that are fields based on the ones in building an event that I fill out at the beginning of each build, and if it is for a length of time, the various types of day those events could fall into which then can be copied out using the Product Creation Utility in Season Maintenance. The prep work is a bit involved, but I find that the chances of making a really massive error can be lessened by sort of spelling it all out for those sorts of bulk-builds involving many daily events. And for some of the events, like the online ones, we have the programming parties upload a doc - Word or Excel, or Google-Docs - with all of the info we need (event names, dates, times, pricing, any special pricing, offers, capacities, etc. directly to a card in Trello and I then use that to code out what will end up in Tessitura (thank goodness for price templates!). Sometimes with these, I can use the Product Creation Utility, but not always.
In Trello, we have a list for each Onsale, which we typically do on Tuesdays each week, with only one type of thing going onsale at once so as to also pace our marketing emails, phone and web volume, and just total amount of stuff we have to build (it is me and my boss on the building/Operations front, so we can only do so much at any given time). We pull a report of the events and/or packages we have built, it gets posted, and our requestors are supposed to go through and proof for any date/time/name/pricing edits and let us know.Then the perf IDs get shared to one of the web team who does a majority of linking our TNEW events to their respective web pages on our website, and we also ask for any holds be submitted on another card in that same list of the build. Having all of those steps as their own cards in Trello makes it easier to track, we don't have to dig through emails (as much), and we can also copy them or look back through things if something comes up. While we do have specific cards for things like Web Content, our Creative team also use their own intake format through Basecamp (for images being used, copy, etc.) as well as their own Trello board for tracking the myriad of targeted marketing emails, social media, etc. that go out in relation to everything we put onsale. Haven't explored much of any ways to create common forms in Trello for data submissions, so when we upload things it tends to be either an Excel doc or Google Doc that we can work off of. And not all of our Trello users across the Museum have the non-free Trello accounts, so not all plug-ins can be accessed by all.
When it comes to then tracking internal ticket requests for any and all of these things, we use a Sharepoint form which goes to our Ticketing Services team and gets processed there - it has specifics about which department is doing the requesting, is there a related hold, is it a free ticket or paid, etc. that they need to create the right orders. We have really pushed to move everything to be a Print at Home PDF ticket with Covid - we can do tickets as Will-Call for situations where the end user may not have an email, and we had the good sense to eliminate mailing tickets many years ago (and hope NEVER to return to that practice!). Our House Managers used to manage all ticket requests for public programs, while the Ticketing Services team handled Admissions requests, but we have not yet re-hired House Managers for Programs yet. But having a form where you can then track and extract requests to compare to what you are creating as orders in Tessitura is hugely helpful and definitely needed when you are dealing with a finite number of holds and who gets what.
Let me know if you have any questions - always happy to jump on a zoom call or explain/share further the methods to the madness. I've tried to move some of my process to be entered digitally, but I am rather old-school so I do alot of the perf coding, layout, etc. on paper (it is just the way my brain works......) which I keep for at least a year and then usually either file away or toss after about 3 years - yes, I am probably a bit of a pack rat when it comes to historical documents of past builds, but it is surprising sometimes that by looking back at old notes one finds solutions or sees where we began doing something different in how we built an event, so that can be handy!.
Best of luck in determining a solution to your building intake flow - and always happy to share any additional insights or tricks I've found along the way.
Cheers,
Anne
Anne Schleigh
Assistant Operations Manager
Museum of Fine Arts
aschleigh@mfa.org
Hi Anne, I'm interested if you have people email direct to the Trello board, including attachments like excel etc. Most of the time I'm attaching links to SharePoint files. We use the Placker Power up for mirroring boards in case something in one boards workflow changes another
Hi Heath,
We give our key department players full access to the Trello board so that they can manage their cards, etc. and have found that if they can also see what's happening on other cards, it can often answer some of their own questions. To date, we haven't had any catastrophic accidents with this sort of access (at least that finding accidental archiving couldn't fix), so fingers crossed we can continue in that vein.
I checked out Placker and am testing the free part of it (where the card duration tracking lives), and we may do some further investigation onto the paid portion of it if the other functions look promising (we use Trello for a whole lot of other things, both Tess related and not), so many thanks for sending that my way!! We've also got the Calendar power-up going, and I suspect there are a few others out there that might come in handy. It is finding the time to go digging for all that cool stuff that gets in the way of the other work needing done :-)
Thanks,
Placker is easier than writing extensive Butler commands. I'm finding calendar to be great for am overview and am pushing them for alerts based on checklist date and start date.
To the original topic having people cc email the trello board your iseing as a build project management till can be an easy time saver.
Templating often reused boards is s time saver as well.