Hi friends,
A nonprofit in my city is starting a subsidized ticket program in an effort to make the arts more accessible, but also support the presenting organizations at the same time. My org has been selected for the pilot program, along with a couple other Tess orgs in town. The deal for the patron is that they can purchase flat rate $10 tickets to any performance, any seat, and the supporting NP will cover the remaining ticket cost via invoice at the close of the production. We're super excited to be a part of this initiative, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to make it work in Tess.
A few specifics are that the patron needs to be able to purchase online (making a phone call would be a barrier to many folks we're trying to reach), they must be able to select their own seats, and we need to be able to track the full value of the ticket when it was sold to account for dynamic pricing. I also want to be able to put that invoiced revenue into the show GL in Tessitura so we can track the full revenue accordingly, but I don't want to impact seating/attendance numbers.
I know I can create a pricing rule for the patron to get $10 tickets. I'm working with my DBA to see if we can get the value information in Analytics, though that's not as straightforward as we'd hoped; the various values for Ticket Base Value, Ticket Home Value, Ticket Current Base Value, etc etc don't seem to be giving us what we're looking for. I'm considering creating a dummy performance for each production where I can enter the invoiced value of the tickets so that it will go into the correct GL, but I'm not sure of the best way to set that up so that it wouldn't impact attendance data.
We have a different subsidy program through a few corporations in town that pay for half of their employees' ticket costs, but those patrons have to call to order and we process those orders as split payments with one half paid by the patron, and the other paid by another payment method that we treat like an invoice. When we get the lump payments from those employers, we enter the credit through the employer's account to balance the books. This was how I was originally hoping to approach this new pilot program, but I don't think it's possible without an agent entering the order.
Any ideas would be appreciated, we're hoping to get this off the group ASAP so we can have folks attend our Christmas show, which is already under way.
We actually have a system in place that does the exact thing you are describing. However, the system is done through the use of TNEW's web customization process. So in order to implement, someone at your organization must know how to use the LWP_VALIDATE_CART sql procedure in the database(and this will need to be updated to a whole new system when you upgrade to V16), and quite possibly understand the basics of the Tessitura RestAPI. If you think something like that would be feasible for you, I could give you some more details. But the reason we had to do it this way is because most of the tickets were being sold for touring Broadway shows where the company would not approve something like a deep discount and then we had to do a full settlement with commissions and everything after each show. So we had to report the full revenue for each ticket, and then get reimbursed for the subsidized amount at a later date. If you have full control over the performances, pricing, and if your shows are all GA, then I think Rebecca's suggestions of a discounted price type or a dummy performance might make more sense. If you use a special price type, you should be able to build a report in Analytics that totals up all subsidized revenue based on that specific price point vs the full priced ticket and fees.
Hi Jesse,
Thanks for the response. I'd be interested in learning more about your system, it might be feasible for us. We are already on v16 if that makes a difference. We do have full control over our performances and pricing, but our shows are not GA. We use SYOS for single tickets.