Hello!
I'm looking for input from organizations who have implemented guest checkout in TNEW. Preferably, I'm looking for organizations with a similar structure to ours (season-based performing arts or annual performing arts festival), but I'll take anything. Mostly I'm wondering how bad is the issue with duplicates? Does the increase in revenue offset the additional staff capacity required to maintain duplicate records? How have you addressed the issue of duplicate records created by guest checkout?
Thanks in advance!
Michael
An additional 2 seconds of searching would have yielded this nice little resource on guest checkout and merge handling, but I'm still interested in your first-hand experience should you be willing to share!
Depending on your budget you might consider contracting with Tessitura Extended Services to build an auto-merge process for certain merges (i.e. matching name and email address).
Thanks, Gawain! I could probably make a case for it if the duplicates become too cumbersome. Is this something you have in place? If so, has it worked well?
We do and it worked fine until we expanded into a consortium: I haven't had time to get around to reorganizing it to handle that. There's always a modest delta between potential duplicates and what we determined was a safe bar for certain duplicates, so it won't get everything, but it will certainly get the majority of your guest checkout accounts.
We need to revisit guest checkout, but our biggest sticking point that I remember was transactions where we didn't want to allow it (contributions, for instance).
Yes, I recall that "all or nothing" issue as well. At the first Tessitura organization I was with, we decided against GC for that exact reason. In fact, when posting this, I found an old forum post by a younger me looking for ways to address that. At the time, Tessitura said they were looking to enhance GC to allow it to be configurable at the product level, but that was in 2018.
Thanks again!
Hi Michael,
Paul with the TNEW Product Team here, it is great to see all of this discussion around Guest Checkout. You are right that we have been thinking about enhancing the availability of Guest Checkout based on product and it is still something we are considering. An upvote of the idea on our ideas board will always help get it onto the official roadmap.
That having been said, beginning with v16, we are excited to offer prior guests the ability to upgrade their Guest account into a full constituent account with a password. While slightly different from your request, this should help cut down on some duplication.
Again, always great to see the discussion, thanks for starting it here.
Thank you, Paul! I've upvoted that idea. We are hoping to start the process of upgrading to v16 after this year's festival run, and should we start using guest checkout, will be grateful for that feature!
in regards to the guest check out being all or nothing - this was an issue for us as well as we didn't want transactions that had a membership in the cart to be able to use guest check out - our clever web dev added some java script to check the cart contents & if membership was in there to hide the guest checkout option. This has worked really well for us so far.
The thing that I find most annoying with guest check out is that the account is created in Tessitura regardless of if the transaction was completed. I get why but it would be nice to have an easy option to have those accounts purge at the end of the day or something similar!
Thanks for the input, Jo Bramley! That sounds like a great solution. We're still discussing the idea of using guest checkout, but if we decide to give it a go, do you think your (very clever) web developer would be willing to spare a little time to tell us more about what they designed?
I'm sure - he's a very lovely man!
Great, I will definitely be in touch when the time comes. Thanks again!