Hello!
We are currently closed to the public due to renovation and haven't actually used Tessitura much for daily admissions. We are trying to figure out the best way to roll a daily admissions ticket into a membership. Let's say a guest reserves their daily admissions ticket online. When they get to the museum they see our membership benefits and would like to become a member. We'd like to use the money that they have paid for their daily admissions ticket toward their membership.
Do you do this at your museum or attraction? We'd love to hear how you record these transactions. Does ticketing take the hit or membership? Do you use a fake or dummy payment method? On Account? How does your finance department account for it? What if they decide to become a member after they've been through the museum but before they've left the property? Does that change how you process the transfer?
Thank you in advance!
Hi Jessie,
We do this at The Tech Interactive! The process is the same whether visitors come to the desk at the beginning or end of their visit. Because they ordered online, they already have a constituent record created. We ask for their order ID#, which is on their email confirmation/ticket from their online order. We open that order and refund the general admission tickets, placing the credit On Account. (We have a specific On Account Membership payment method set up for this purpose.) Then we open a new order, entering their constituent ID. We add a membership contribution, paying for it in part with the money on account and then asking the new member to pay the balance. We also have a specific source code set up to track these "admission to membership upgrades," which is in part why we do the membership transaction on a new order instead of on the original ticket order. We process the membership as usual at that point.
You didn't ask this, but we do the same for on-site admission ticket purchases -- we have signage and voiceovers encouraging visitors to upgrade their admission tickets to a membership if they enjoyed their visit. If someone came to the desk, we'd ask for their physical printed ticket and get the order number off of that. If it had initially been an anonymous transaction (constituent ID 0), we create a new constituent record for the person, reassign that order to the newly created constituent record, and then proceed to refund the ticket costs to On Account and process a membership order. We also allow ticket to membership conversions for a few days post-visit, and the process is the same - we just take payment for the balance due over the phone.
We redirect the ticket cost toward membership's income stream so that the new member can get the full amount credited as a tax-deductible contribution.
Emily Allen
Membership Manager
The Tech Interactive, San Jose, CA
Hi Jessie
I should preface this with the cavate that I am several years removed from having done a conversion. At Shedd we follow most of the steps Emily outlined. Where we differ is that we no longer refund the orders to On Account and instead use a dummy payment method. We pivoted away several years ago at Accounting's request. We were doing so many conversions that number of tickets that were being removed from the daily attendance became problematic for reporting purposes. Our dummy payment is called Ticket conversion to membership, and it is on the staff member to calculate the convertible portion of an order and apply that towards a membership using this payment method. As part of their monthly reconciliation Accounting works their magic and adjusts the GL as needed.
Melissa Halili and her great Membership team at Liberty Science Center work a process for this all the time. It's been a few years since I've worked there so I don't remember the details. However Melissa, if you are hanging out here in the group. Please jump in with anything you might be able to share.
Hi Jessie, we do this regularly.It's our conversion campaign and we are very active in promoting it. Our advantage is that we have membership set up as a product not a contribution, so this gives us liberty to just return the daily admission and add a membership as product and run the cc for the difference. I am sure you could probably do it the same way with on account funds. Ticketing takes the hit as all revenue is considered membership revenue. The logic behind it is that if the visitor had known about the membership program before buying tickets they most probably would have gotten the membership in the first place.