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
I feel like I must be missing some essential and obvious business rule but.... do the digital and the in-person need to be different events?
If the digital version is available to anyone with a real ticket, you don't innately have to have it as a separate thing. You'd have to experiment with the digital content settings to pin down what configuration of before and after in-person runs fits the bill, but nothing you typed struck me as incredibly different than what those settings allow.
Reporting could be interesting, but it's going to be regardless. If you'd otherwise auto-sell someone both, you'd already have counts that don't distinguish access vs interest/use. You could probably do something with zones or price types to have people pre-indicate 'in person only, virtual only, both' if you want to capture intent. Your real reporting for virtual viewing comes from 3rd party collection like integrated Google Analytics or your video plays. (Though presumably there's a native "attendance" tracking aspect coming online sooner or later.)
Hope this is useful to ponder and not just an odd sidetrack.
It sounds like maybe you only get the digital option with certain in person purchases. You'd also need a separate show to sell digital-only access. But I think you're right in that you could turn on digital content for an in person event.
Dates are, at least for us, generally tricky: In order to sell a digital event after initial availability we wait until the initial availability date and then change the date on the performance to be the end of availability so that will will stay on sale. Fudging date display in TNEW is possible, but it keeps cropping up in inconvenient places.
I contemplated that, and I think it might work, but is just a nightmare of manual work for a department of one. I might still need to involve my consortium DBA to see if there's a way to blast this onto TNEW Admin Sites, because otherwise I'm manually altering 180 performances with the dates, since the relative dates would be different for each performance.
I have to look at those settings further. Maybe I was just overthinking all that.
What if you had an in person performance and a digital-only performance, but both were configured to display digital content? Do you need to sell some in-person seats without digital access?
I suppose not. If you don't use it, you don't use it. Yeah, I'm beginning to think I did overthink this, and will just have to suck it up and do all the manual dates and see if I can get the digital content page to display properly without dates there.
Make sure to spend some of that experimentation time considering how Product Type level settings can help you! (Seeming superfluous entries there might have real dividends. And perhaps it's possible to do a fake out of sorts by switching from one Product Type to another when the in-person ends, just to trigger some wide spread changes.)
At any rate, I'm a big advocate--though not in a proud way, just realistic!--of considering something not really provided if you don't point someone to it. Contractual obligations of course matter, but in the absence of those restrictions, you can message those who "need" it as your fulfillment of the purchase and simply leave well enough alone for others. If they find it because of other familiarity with where to look, there's presumably no harm.
[And this conversation makes me thankful that I'm only thinking hypothetically. Plenty of other challenges on our table, but happy to not have a personal stake. Best of luck to finding a practical option.]