Cross-Posted in Ticketing & Customer Service
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.
Do you want this to also be online or just for onsite? If only onsite, just make the new price type adjustable and set the price to $0. You can always adjust it up to $10 using the Price Details button.
If online also, do you use TNEW? If so, you can.
This is what it looks like on the website when a price type amount is editable (in between the red arrows – the red arrows do not show up on website).
To enable this feature online, the price type
Product Type Editor:
Component Editor:
We are only offering it in-person. How would an editable price type work for tracking? I basically need a report or a button to tell my Front Desk "ok, you have 10 pay it forward tickets available, now you used 2, so now you only have 8." I do not think there is anything in Tessitura that will support that currently (as Gawain said).
You could use Allocation Codes. You build an Allocation Map with say 10 specific seats with that allocation and then apply the map to your performances. This can limit the number of seats allocated to an allocation on a performance. You might have pick a different MOS for access to these price type(s).
You assign Allocations codes to specific MOS. Your editable price type must have access to that MOS. You might have to create a whole new price type for the adjustable version. This way your staff needs to change the MOS to access it. The Allocation would limit it to say 10.
Also, you might want to create a new MOS just for this purpose. If your performance uses Best Seat, then it might inadvertently seat them in another Allocation because the price type and Allocation has access to both Modes of Sale. Creating a MOS for only this purpose would avoid that issue.
My problem is I don't want a limit on the number of seats. I want to be able to see in real time as people donate, so if we run out of seats (according to your model) and a person suddenly donates half way through the day, I need that now paid for seat to become available for use without me having to adjust the seatmap every 10 minutes.
If I knew the set number going into each day it would be great, but with this type of program I am at the mercy of our patrons...so I will not know exactly how many seats we have to work with until patrons actually donate.
I feel like our Off-Tessitura passes are going to be our only tracking option for now.