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.
Hi Chelsea,
You could look at creating a "dummy performance" of Pay it Forward. As folks donate, you "sell" as seat in the map at $10.00. Then, as they are redeemed you could "return" the seat and "refund" it to an allocated payment method. It's a bit weird, as you're essentially refunding a ticket and not really able to track who "redeemed" the ticket, but that is a way to move the money into and out of a bucket as they're used and a way to visually see how much inventory you have. If the money movement matters less (so the donated money could just sit in the performance) you could have 2 price types and 2 zones to visually divide the dummy perf map. Sell the redemptions as a zero dollar ticket to zone 2, and as a long as there are more Zone 1 seats purchased than Zone 2 you know you have redemptions available. You'd want this perf to be evergreen for the season so set the end date at the end of your fiscal year so it's accessible at any time.
Best,
Katina
Firstly, these are all excellent ideas and if not for Chelsea's business case today I know someone is going to be stealing those ideas sometime (probably me)*.
I like this idea Katrina, but (devils advocate) - do you need to exchange it from a new performance ... or at all? Could the purchaser become the initiator and the user be the recipient?
Who's the owner? Maybe a Special Museum Customer NBMOAA:PIF customer in case you need the data living in a special ownership for privacy (check in with your data and privacy officer)*** It's also MUCH easier to track how many tickets/seats this punk** has.
If it's a museum (using timed admission) you don't need a separate performance... steal Neil's idea and use a special zone in place of allocation.Worried about running out of space in case 900 Pay It Forward tickets happen? Maybe the map just has a new "screen" on the right for spill over.
Hate the idea of messing around in the same order or in case people donate 3 tickets and you only need to redeem 1. Exchange into new order. The "From" order has the initiator and you can exchange from that "pool" of orange seats in your special PIF zone regardless of the order_no
Need some other financial reconciliation or hate all these ideas? What am I? Your mum? Get a hair cut and get a job you hippy!
Love
H
_____
* Remember CASE = Copy And Steal Everthing
** punk = fake customer account.
*** Check in with your data and privacy officer and finance wizard first. Guaranteed that by asking BEFORE doing kooky thing you will be their favourite person that day.
I like Heath's idea of adding a Zone for spillover.
Otherwise, I was wondering why you would want to limit the number of people willing to give you money? If 100 people want to give us $10 each, sounds like a plan to me. I'd just make a new price type that is adjustable so you know why it has $0 and other amounts. In Analytics, Ticket Value is an option. You could display how many paid what amount. Another option is the Performance Revenue Breakdown report.