Wordfly Pages taking RSVP for Special Events

Hi Tom - 

That functionality specifically around Special Activities and Elevated Events never reached the fully baked stage, and is not currently supported in the Tessitura WordFly Pages integration at this point. In the V16 upgrade you'll see those choices removed from the dropdown until we have a chance to revisit them.

Apologies for the confusion! They *may* have worked at some point, and for some people may still limp along, but we found in our initial testing some serious issues which caused us to hold on pushing forward until we can spend some quality time looking at them. 

At this point the free integration is only intended to work with CSIs for things like performance cancellation.

Hope that helps!

Best,

Heather

Product Owner, Integrations

Given that this worked at some level in the 2021 season and before for Spoleto Festival USA.  This is not exactly what I expected or wanted to hear.

That said, I thank you for sharing some insight on this confusing situation.

Do you have any recommendations for a low effort way to setup Special Event RSVPs?  That are targets to specific Donors for whom we already have records?

--Tom

I'm also disappointed to hear that this was never fully rolled out. We are not using pages and this is the one things we were planning on using them for, so we will hold off. 

I'm not sure how many people you have for each special event, but we use them for invite-only events and have people RSVP to an email address (either our membership office if it is a members-only event or a special rsvp@hnoc.org account we set up for just these sorts of things). The RSVPs then get manually updated in the constituent records as they come in.

Since the functionality you want isn't available, you may be able to set up a zero cost event that is only viewable when a certain constituency is logged in, or use a promo code to allow certain constituents to reserve a ticket? I'm not sure whether your guests already have accounts but it's an idea. Hope you find something that works!

Staci Stickovich

Thank you for this thought.  We are considering this as a work around. However there seem to be a number of challenges with the approach.

• The experience for the RSVPing donor is more complicated having to go through the full TNew sales path, carting and order completion.
• The setup for us would be more complicated in setting up a full performance,
• RSVP over the phone will be more complicated because this will have to be done in an order, in a batch, most of our special event folks don’t have experience yet in these areas…
• I’m still investigating but it appears we might have some customizations that assume that these events are recorded in special activities.

Have you found any ways to minimize these impacts?  

Hi
We have a custom website (with Adage) and have been able to set up RSVP pages that work with Special Activities. For events that are open to the public, when a patron responds an activity record is added to their account. For events that have invitation lists, the RSVP option is only available to those patrons who have the activity on their record. All of this functionality requires the patron to be signed into the site. Send me an email if you would like more details. 
Best
Jess Levy
jlevy@sfopera.com

Jess Levy

Thanks for sharing this. This is a Very cool custom web site feature.  

Unfortunately, we have not.

I know it's not what you want to hear if there is a goal of it not being about CSIs, but I would absolutely still use Pages to collect quick registrants for simple, free events. CSIs get the data collected and it's connected to individual constituents after all. 

HOWEVER, if you have to have a capacity limit on it and that's tight, nothing about Pages will cut off registrations based on count--typically the dealbreaker for me in this situation. The other dealbreaker I tend to encounter with Pages is that you can really only use it in connection to a deployed email, since you more or less need the deployment in order to have a response sync to Tess. 

It feels very odd to offer this recommendation in a thread about WordFly functionality, but I do heartily recommend L2's Flex2 product. We implemented it for the 'Stream2' variation that handles sales and authorization for Brightcove-based streaming, and all form types are available to you once you're up and running. There will be additional cost (and still no connection to Special Activities), but it's a very smart tool for a quick experience on the patron side and pretty solid data flow into Tess. Managing all it offers can be high maintenance, though with great payoff--just frustrating to keep on top off if you have a lot active at a time and realize a change that needs to be made across everything. Note that it does not have the ability to restrict access based on constituency/rank/etc, as that's not the point. If that's key, you will need to manage it through how you distribute the form url.

Thanks Jamie O'Brien.  There are some good thoughts here.  We are investigating several directions.  No conclusion at this time.