If you folks are anything like us, you move a large numbers of student complimentary tickets out the door for each event.
Currently, this is an in-person process they can only complete during our weekday daytime hours - exactly when they are in classes. They fill out a paper form and we cross-check their ID's (both hard copy and their student portals), against a physical list provided to us by the departments for each event. New this year, Faculty/staff request via a general boxoffice email which has been going swimmingly. However, the fac/staff comp list is fairly static from event to event and the student lists are not. Additionally, there are just too many student requests.
I am investigating how to get student complimentary tickets online somehow. I am pretty sure having them process their own tickets via TNew in not an option because there is no way to "plug into" a University database to verify their University student and departmental qualifying status at the time of processing. Does anyone have a process in place that removes the in-person aspect? Are there any pitfalls or warnings you'd offer?
We have a custom integration that runs a nightly script to add new students and faculty/staff to our database. They are assigned a student or fac/staff constituency code and an automatic login is created for them using their university-affiliated email. They must be logged in to our website to access the free or discounted price type. It works beautifully but it isn't cheap and when it was developed no one thought about antiquated data so now we have years' worth of inactive emails from past employees and students which I'm currently trying to figure out how to manage in the future. I wish Tessitura allowed SSO integrations because that would be so much easier to manage than the custom integration we have.
We are in the process of enabling an integration like this for student discounts! As Staci mentions, it is not cheap, and has to be monitored once in place, especially after upgrades. We would love an SSO option as well, for similar reasons.If you'd like to talk more about how we make this work, please feel free to reach out. Happy to chat!