Collecting Guest Information at Front Gate

At TLCC2018, Erica Simonitis from the Met Museum presented on using collective constituent records to track geographical data as part of the General Public, But Not Anonymous session. She said they created 100k constituent records, one for each US zip code and one for each country. A record is attached to each general admission transaction. It looks like Erica is no longer with the Met. I'm curious to hear if anyone else has gone this route.

-Annie

Annie Petroff (Past Member) Liberty Science Center has been using the one Account per ZipCode route for many years.

Oh, great! We’re looking at the pros and cons of zip code collection via survey vs. collective constituent records.

I have some questions for you, if you have a moment:

• What impact does this have on system performance? Do you find that the system is noticeably slower when using some of the more popular zip code records?
• What scripting does the staff use to obtain the data?
  • What do they do if someone chooses not to give their zip code?
• Do you offer member conversions after someone buys general admission tickets from the general zip code accounts?
  • How does that work?
  • Any system performance issues specific to this process?
• How do you collect this information for web sales?
• What was the reasoning behind the switch from using the anonymous survey to using the constituent records?

Thanks in advance!

Annie

Oh, great! We’re looking at the pros and cons of zip code collection via survey vs. collective constituent records.

I have some questions for you, if you have a moment:

• What impact does this have on system performance? Do you find that the system is noticeably slower when using some of the more popular zip code records?
• What scripting does the staff use to obtain the data?
  • What do they do if someone chooses not to give their zip code?
• Do you offer member conversions after someone buys general admission tickets from the general zip code accounts?
  • How does that work?
  • Any system performance issues specific to this process?
• How do you collect this information for web sales?
• What was the reasoning behind the switch from using the anonymous survey to using the constituent records?

Thanks in advance!

Annie

Pasting Anne Marie's response as it has a lot of really helpful information.

Subject: RE: [External] - TLCC2018 Presentation - Zip Code Collection Questions

Annie,

Happy to help!  This is actually the second time that I’ve worked with this process.  I was at the Liberty Science Center when Tessitura went live and we made this process a part of the implementation.  When the conversation started at The Met it just made sense to propose the same process here.

• What impact does this have on system performance? Do you find that the system is noticeably slower when using some of the more popular zip code records?
  • There is no impact on performance when loading the constituent record onto an order, even for popular accounts.  However, we did need to make sure that users never tried to access the Order or Ticket History screens of these accounts, as the amount of data loading would freeze their screen.  To prevent this we assigned a constituency to all of these records and removed access to these screens in Security.   This is not really an issue, as users really need to see Order or Ticket history for a GA order.   If users do need to find an old order they can use the Order Search screen. 
• What scripting does the staff use to obtain the data?
  • I work in IT so Hayden would probably be better suited to answer this question, but from my understanding it is one of the first things a customer is asked when they approach a register.  Since our Admission Policy and pricing is based on where a customer lives it fits naturally into the transaction flow.  At the Liberty Science Center it was also one of the first things the cashier asked.  We had an extremely high response rate – it was actually fairly rare for a customer to refuse to answer. 
  • What do they do if someone chooses not to give their zip code?
    • The account field is left empty and the order goes to the 0 constituent. 
  • Do you offer member conversions after someone buys general admission tickets from the general zip code accounts?  Yes, this is common.
    • How does that work?
      • The original order is loaded and the tickets are returned.  The user changes the constituent record on the order and sells the membership.  They add membership tickets to the order (to replace the returned tickets) and a ticket to print a temporary membership card.  As it is still possible to sell a membership to a location record by accident we added an interceptor that throws an error if either a Member ticket or temp membership card ticket are added to an order tied to one of these accounts.  It’s based on the tickets as interceptors can’t be triggered by contributions. 
    • Any system performance issues specific to this process?
      • No performance issues.
    • How do you collect this information for web sales?
      • All web sales are tied to actual constituent records, so we have their location information. 
    • What was the reasoning behind the switch from using the anonymous survey to using the constituent records?
      • There were several reasons.  First, the survey can’t be set to launch at the start of an order, so it would need to be manually triggered each time.  Second, on a survey it would need to be a string field for the cashier to type in, which could easily lead to a lot of bad data.  Finally, having the location data be tied to the actual address fields in a constituent record makes it much easier to analyze the data as it all lives in one place.  If the data is collected in a survey for our anonymous constituents but tied to the constituent record for our known customers (members, web purchasers, etc.) it creates two data sets we have to work with.  In general, it’s a lot easier to work with data that’s tied to constituent records instead of having to marry survey data with transactional data.  This was much more true in earlier versions of Tessitura, but I think improvements in 14 and 15 have made it a bit simpler.  It’s also just easier for adding functionality, like interceptors and pricing rules – which we use.

--

Anne Marie Ryan
Manager of Constituent Applications