Originally posted in the Mountain Region community.
My supervisor asked me to see if other orgs were doing manual event attendance, versus using the scanners. Is that a thing?
I know the system was designed to be used with scanners, but we were wondering if there are in fact cases where a printed list and good old-fashioned checking people in was preferred. If you do manually pull an attendance list (and manually enter your attendees after the fact), can I ask what type of events you do that for? Why does a manual process work for you, in that case?
Clearly you don't want to be spending a whole day checking hundreds of people in when you could spend one hour equipped with a scanner or two and check in the same number of people.
I'm all ears...
We do a mix, with the vast majority of events being scanned. Events in our theatres and larger venues are always scanned. When we have workshops or events in our lofts, or smaller tents, we won't print tickets and the ushers will have a registration list. I don't think we use registration lists for anything that's going to have more than 30 people.
This is often when our campus will have 5 or more events happening across the campus at the same time, and the scanners are already being used in the theatres and larger venues. We also sometimes use registration lists when we do small capacity events at off site venues.The event types where we use registration lists are usually masterclasses, workshops, walking tours, or small-audience site-specific theatre that traverses the campus.
Do you record your manual attendance in Tessitura? If so, how - are you reporting ticket sales (rather than Attendance), or do you have another method?
Hi! Not sure if this was meant for us or Ben. But for us (The Neon Museum) we only record attendance manually for people that have tickets so we are able to report on both ticket sales and attendance due to this process.
I actually do not think you can record attendance manually to a guest that does not have a ticket number. Ben please correct me if I am wrong :)
We are a museum and we host a variety of programs. We use scanners for museum admission and most programs. However, for things like opening receptions, we just count the number of people who attend with a clicker and then put in tickets after the fact. We then use a custom utility to mark those tickets as attended. For offsite events, we bring a list and either scan the tickets on-site later that day or I manually enter who attended. If it is a larger event, then I use the utility and don't worry about which specific tickets get marked as attend. We're more interested in having an accurate number.
Similar to other posters, we do a mix. We use an "Attendance By Performance" report as a back up in case anyone at a larger event forgets to bring their barcoded ticket with them. We were previously producing a "Barcode Report" using Order Export Utility to have barcodes available to scan in case a patron forgot, but those reports are a pain in the neck to produce and don't always work (I can aim the scanner at the barcode 10 times and it still won't capture).
We also use the same attendance report for our smaller studio classes where there may only be 5-10 patrons in the class (we have a max of 2 classes per day, so it's nothing crazy). We will just check their name off the list (2 checks if they bought 2 tickets, 3 for 3 tickets, etc.). Then when it is quieter at the Front Desk one of our Associates will go back in and manually mark those 10 or so patrons. This works better for us in this case because a lot of our patrons for these classes have been with us from before Tessitura and are not used to producing a barcode upon arrival; they are just used to giving their name at the front desk, so to make it easier on our patrons we do it manually.
For extra large events (like our Community Days or Student Art Show Openings) where we could get up to 500 people and all the other departments need is a headcount, we will hand tally people and put the total number under one order after the fact. Then to mark as attended we'll create a group header for that order to scan 1 barcode and capture all 500 at once.
I think my museum would benefit from having a clicker for a similar reason. Right now we do tally marks on a piece of paper (which is almost always wrong) for our really big events like that. Have you seen an improvement in accuracy from using one? And are your associates good with using it? They are cheap enough on Amazon; I just wanted to see if they are worth it before I buy one.