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Museum Membership and Timed Tickets

Ashley Staley (Past Member)
$organization

Hello! 

I am with a historic site that is moving to timed ticket entry for mansion tours, which is GREAT! However, the shift is raising several logistical questions about how we will continue serving our members, donors, and constituents who are more than a traditional guest. 

Our members can visit as many times as they like within the membership level they have. Example: Our "Dual" membership includes 2 adults and at any time the 2 adults can tour the mansion, and they can purchase discounted tickets for additional family/friends (with a limit on how many they can purchase in a year). Because we have not used timed tickets, all membership ticket transactions occur onsite at the ticket office rather than having members purchase tickets in advance online. We have soft-opened the site using timed tickets, and are now running into issues of members not being able to tour the site because we are sold out and they could not reserve tickets online in advance. 

The first shift for us will be implementing membership availability online for advanced ticket purchase. Does anyone know if we can cap the number of tickets a member can reserve at their comp rate based on their membership level by transaction? We utilize pricing rules for members to purchase discounted special event/program tickets online based on constituency, but can we go further with membership level? 

The second shift is giving them the capability to purchase discounted tickets online associated with their membership level. Does anyone know how we may accomplish this? 

Lastly, does anyone have policies in place for members who purchase their membership onsite, but the tours are sold out?  Do you have a separate entry line to try and accommodate them? 

Apologies for the lengthy post, and am grateful for any insight you are able to share. We use TNEW for our online sales component. 

Thank you!
Ashley

  • $organization

    Hi Ashley, I can't answer all your questions but I can offer how we restrict the number of member tickets per transaction and how we sell them online. We are a museum, research center, and publisher if that helps at all. We only ticket the museum facilities. Each of our membership levels has its own Web MOS that is triggered by the membership constituency -- each membership level has an associated constituency (this was a custom build). Each of those MOSes has its own price type that is specific to the membership level (this was also a way to get membership level on the ticket so people feel recognized). We use pricing rules in the application to change the price type from GA to the membership level and restrict it to 2 or 1, based on level. On the web, I go into Ticketing Set Up and use Offers on the Web MOSes to restrict the number of member price type tickets that are available. If they can purchase additional tickets at the regular rate, then I'm done. The system will add any additional ones at the GA rate. If it is a member only event, then I cap the max number of tickets on TNEW at 2. The one thing I don't like about this set up is that members have to sign in before adding tickets to the cart or the system errors out because of the MOS shift. It is my understanding that with V16 we will be able to set up benefit rules that will work like pricing rule and allow us to restrict the number of tickets to single events or seasons. I'm looking forward to this feature!

    We are currently requiring people to make reservations in advance, so we haven't faced the issue of members showing up when we are at capacity (we only opened yesterday!). We are being very strict with our capacity -- even staff working in the galleries (marketing staff, for example) have to have tickets so we can track how many are on site. 

    I hope that helps. I'm happy to talk more if anything isn't clear.

    Anne
    The Historic New Orleans Collection

  • $organization

    We are a general admission facility, but I'll offer what advice I can!

    • I'm not sure how to tie in Membership level (at Mystic, our 'Constituencies' make use of things like 'VIP', 'Trustee' etc. I'm not sure if those are what you need).
      • You also could run a list of each set of folks at each Membership level
      • You could also use Rankings, I think
        • Once you select your method of separating folks out, you could just set the new set of Pricing Rules to look at those metrics, and set the Rule to fire once per order only, and cap it only a certain number of discounts per order.
    • The TNEW functionality would be similar (in setup) to onsite functionality, you'd just associate the pricing rules with the correct Pricing Rule Set
      • You can also get creative (if you'd like) with assigning phrases to certain promo/source code combinations, to have the members unlock their tickets
    • We use Modes of Sale and Allocations to set aside certain numbers of tickets for members only (using promo codes to trigger a MOS shift), I'm not sure how your admissions are set up, but with COVID restrictions, we only have 50% limit on occupancy, and we set aside certain amounts of tickets for members, some for public, and some for selected discount programs.

    Not sure if these would be helpful (I do the ticketing for Mystic, but I'm only connected tangentially with memberships), but let me know!

  • $organization

    Hi Ashley,

    We've been using the Entitlements add-on for situations where we want to limit the number of comp/discounted tickets members can get online. Setup's a little complex but it works great. It's essentially the precursor for the v16 benefits functionality Nathanael mentioned. It's not free, but it might be worth it if you're in a pinch.

    If you've got a SQL developer in house, you could also roll your own by customizing lwp_validate_precart. I've had success with introducing ticket limits this way in cases where Entitlements weren't quite what we needed.

  • $organization in reply to Scott Colby (Past Member)

    We're still on 15.0.4 (soon to be 15.1.11). What functionality were you referring to?

  • $organization in reply to Nathanael Pearson

    My apologies, it was actually Anne who'd referred to the benefits functionality upcoming in v16.

  • $organization

    Hi Ashley,

    As Scott mentioned, the Entitlements Plug-in, available in both the application and on TNEW, is a great way to open up benefits with limited quantities to members, here is some more information: https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Services/Software-and-Web-Consulting/Components#entitlements. If you're interested in knowing more about this option you can simply open a ticket in our help system, or email hello@tessituranetwork.com.

    Hope this helps!

    Colleen