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...
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.