My museum just upped our pricing for children. As a good-will thing (and to hopefully stop the potential pushback), we want to create a "Pay It Forward" option. We offer Free Admission to all on Saturday mornings, and a lot of the time patrons will tell us 'oh we want to donate what would have been admission to the museum anyway.' So we figured this "Pay it Forward" would get supplied by that.
However, I do not know of an easy way of doing this. Originally, I was going to create a Fee with a solid $10 attached (because the kids tickets are now $10) to accept the donation. Then when a family wants/needs to use it, I would create a ticket type in our GA performance labeled "Pay It Forward." That seemed simple enough until I realized we need a way of tracking how many we use, so as to not offer tickets we don't have.
We are currently creating a physical pass (a business card size) to hand to a family, who will then fill out the info requested and hand it back to our Front Desk staff. But I want a way in Tessitura to track as well. I can use a "Ticketing Fee Revenue" report, but is there a better way in real time for my Front Desk staff to know how many of those passes are left?
We recently switched to v16 if that makes a difference.
Hi Chelsea,
I'd like to suggest a process my team currently uses for gift vouchers. We had to stop using traditional gift certificates due to some state laws that are tedious to get into here, but the solution was to offer a voucher, intended to be the value of a single seat, that expires at the end of each season. They are sold as a GA ticket that is allocated to a General Ticket Revenue GL. To redeem them, we start an exchange under the original account owner, return the voucher GA seat, and move it into the actual performance that the recipient wants. We then change the owner of the exchange order to the recipient. The voucher order number is noted in the redemption order to make the paper trail easier to follow. So far, the system has worked well for us.
Alternatively, instead of changing the owner on the order, you could complete the exchange entirely under the original owner account, and put the recipient as the Initiator. This should then show the redemption order in the recipient's order history, and give you access to their email in the redemption order in case you send mobile tickets.
That's actually not a bad idea.
My only concern would be if we put it in our GA performance, we have all of those set to auto-attend for Walk-Up sales. So if we sold a voucher/ticket it would end up getting counted in our Attendance data.
Would a solution for that to be have them switch to a Back Office MOS that isn't set to Auto-attend?
I'd say yes to your question about auto-attend. We don't auto-attend anything due to the nature of our events, but I can see why you do. We have separate performances and a dedicated MOS for vouchers.