Hello all,
So bear with me on this one, it's a whopper, I think. Or it's very obvious and I am overthinking.
We are currently planning how to handle our FY21/22 season, and we are considering the following:
1) All productions are GA to allow social distancing
2) All subscriptions are flex, to add to that flexibility and because the number of performances needs to be fewer due to various COVID related issues.
3) All productions will be filmed and offered digitally to allow patrons uncomfortable with physically coming to the theatre to still see the show.
There is also an idea that if you buy physical flex subscription of 3,4,5, or 6 performances, you also get the digital links automatically added to your digital content page if you suddenly feel uncomfortable or have some other issue.
And for the life of me, I have no idea how to automate this. There are so many permutations of options, I can't easily build out all those as individual packages, and even then, I can't automatically add them to a record. Making the flex packages larger to allow the patron to select the shows digitally doesn't easily work, since I can't lock in the shows they pick based on what other shows they pick, so they could pick shows 1,2, and 3 physically and then add 4,5, and 6 as the digital comp shows and get away with paying for three when seeing six. Pricing rules don't add things to carts, so that is out.
I don't know if you can easily hybridize a performance, making it digital as well as physical (don't think so, but might be wrong), but the idea is the digital run starts with the last week of the run and runs one week after, so even then, the dates don't line up and I would have to manually calculate numerous dates to get them all to line up, and that screams of human error when you're dealing with six shows with thirty performances each and one person having to do it all; I'm good but even I'm not that good.
So long story short, has anyone considered something like this involving automatically hybridizing their season, and if so, have you found a way to make it work with flex packages?
Any help would be much appreciated,
Matt Lazorwitz
Director of IT and Data Insight
People's Light Theatre
That's an interesting idea, and I suspect we might be interested in doing something similar, but I don't have any good ideas for accomplishing it. My best thought would be some method of automating attaching the digital performances to a customers account when they have bought the live performances (although, in your case, only if they are part of the correct package).
Yup, I reached out to our consortium DBA about exactly that, but figured if anyone was doing something like it and would share, it would make her life a wee bit easier. I'll keep you in the loop with whatever solution we come up with.