(Originally posted in Fundraising forum. Posting here to get more eyes.)
Hello,
We're testing out the use of AUX items in TNEW to sell tickets to our Gala. The idea would be to sell tickets to a shell performance, return the purchase to an On Acct payment method, then use the amount to process the contribution.
Has anyone has found a way to automate the return of the ticket purchase? If we can automate that part, then there won't be any additional work for our team. I thought maybe the Event Cancellation Utility could be used, but that would release those seats and we might potentially oversell if those seats become available again. Does anyone know of a way we can stop a ticket that has been purchased and returned from being sold again--essentially placing a blackout hold on the returned seat so it can't be bought again? Maybe there's an easy way to do this, but if there is, I'm not aware of it.
I'm also open to better ways to sell the EE tickets online, but we're trying to avoid the contribute1/2 pages.
Thanks in advance.
Michael Dorsey
We took many runs at this at SDC. My fave was to sell into Zones (table of 10, single seat etc) online as a GA map.
We'd have 20+ tables of 10 as Zones in the same screen and would unseat and reseat them in the order.
We'd then be able to add in the guest as a recipient and add their dietary as a research note.
I had an SSRS report that would run daily on the table owner, seated recipient "guests", and their dietary - Paid / Reserved / Comp status - Unsold seats & Sold but "unallocated"
You could return those to Contribution, and to be fair we did that at the reseating stage.
There is some manual labour but it's all the specialist Philo donor comms stuff that peeps prefer to do as prep.
We could also hand the report to the caterer or use it as a handy supporting doc.
Thank you for replying, Heath Wilder! I wasn't even going to mess with tables--just use the perf to sell individual tickets and instruct folks to call for tables, then hold the table seats on the perf to keep capacity in check. Now I'm testing your method here.
I've made a facility with 30 tables, 30 zones in a GA map, 3 zone groups of 10 tables. When I buy a whole table, everyone gets seated at the same table--beautiful. My only question is how I can get best seating to respect the tables. When I select best available in TNEW, It won't fill up the first available seats on the same table.
The yellow circle is where it is seating tickets in a best available order, but the green represents where I'd ideally like a best available to be seated. Also - the purple seats represent a test order where I've done best available and selected 10 seats (a full table). I feel like this must be something I'm doing wrong with the best seating settings, but I don't do too much facility management these days so if it is, I'm not sure how to fix it. Any idea how I can get this working, if it's possible?
Also, any chance you've still got that custom report? No worries if not. Truly appreciate your help!
Michael
Think it may be my fill pattern and contiguity. I'm going to see if fixing that addresses that issue.
I did think of another question. You said the recipients were the guests. What did you do in the case of guests who had no record in Tessitura? Did you create a dummy record? Forgive me if there's an easy answer to some of these. It has been a long minute since I've gotten so deep into ticketing setup and ticket order processing.
I wrote up some documentation. I'll see if I have it and send it through.