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Daily Admissions Ticket rolled into Membership

Jessie Buford
$organization

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!

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  • $organization
    I am not the person who deals with this daily (although I could probably connect you with that person), but this is absolutely something we deal with regularly, and it has historically been a struggle for us, mostly due to the fact that we swim upstream by not printing actual tickets for onsite sales.
     
    If I recall correctly,  it’s not really a problem for named constituent transactions, since you can always just retroactively pull up the order, add the membership, and then adjust the financial details as appropriate. And if you print physical tickets, then you have a way to recall even general public transactions to adjust them. In your case, if they transacted online, I would also think that you might be able to just pull up the original order and edit it, although now that I think about it that’s probably problematic if it was ordered well in advance.
     
    The trouble we had is that we don’t print physical admission tickets. At our biggest site we use admission stickers, and at smaller sites we just rely on tour guides to corral people.  So we have no easy way to pull up the original order for tickets sold at the gate to “general public.” So we created a “membership conversion” workaround that allowed the sale of a reduced variable price membership into a dummy performance for people who had just come off of a tour and we knew had already paid admission for the day. As far as I know this process is still pretty much in place from when we implemented it.
     
    My recollection is that it  works my selling them a zero priced “conversion membership” performance attached to a new (or existing) constituent, then having the cashier manually add the difference in cost to the member account via a “membership on account”  payment method. Finally they create a CSI to inform the membership team that they need to sort this out (although in retrospect it seems like we could probably automate the CSI creation on the backend if we wanted to.)
     
    I don’t think this is the most elegant solution, and it probably doesn’t entirely answer the accounting question you’re asking about who gets credit. (I think in our case visitor experience probably gets credit for a full price tour and membership essentially has to sell a super-discounted membership. But I think was seen as an acceptable tradeoff given that it lets us gain a member who might have otherwise walked away.)
     
    I will be interested to see what others have to say about this, and if it’s useful I would be happy to connect you with the folks who are more familiar with this process on a day-to-day basis.
     
    -David Dwiggins
    CIO, Historic New England
     
     
Reply
  • $organization
    I am not the person who deals with this daily (although I could probably connect you with that person), but this is absolutely something we deal with regularly, and it has historically been a struggle for us, mostly due to the fact that we swim upstream by not printing actual tickets for onsite sales.
     
    If I recall correctly,  it’s not really a problem for named constituent transactions, since you can always just retroactively pull up the order, add the membership, and then adjust the financial details as appropriate. And if you print physical tickets, then you have a way to recall even general public transactions to adjust them. In your case, if they transacted online, I would also think that you might be able to just pull up the original order and edit it, although now that I think about it that’s probably problematic if it was ordered well in advance.
     
    The trouble we had is that we don’t print physical admission tickets. At our biggest site we use admission stickers, and at smaller sites we just rely on tour guides to corral people.  So we have no easy way to pull up the original order for tickets sold at the gate to “general public.” So we created a “membership conversion” workaround that allowed the sale of a reduced variable price membership into a dummy performance for people who had just come off of a tour and we knew had already paid admission for the day. As far as I know this process is still pretty much in place from when we implemented it.
     
    My recollection is that it  works my selling them a zero priced “conversion membership” performance attached to a new (or existing) constituent, then having the cashier manually add the difference in cost to the member account via a “membership on account”  payment method. Finally they create a CSI to inform the membership team that they need to sort this out (although in retrospect it seems like we could probably automate the CSI creation on the backend if we wanted to.)
     
    I don’t think this is the most elegant solution, and it probably doesn’t entirely answer the accounting question you’re asking about who gets credit. (I think in our case visitor experience probably gets credit for a full price tour and membership essentially has to sell a super-discounted membership. But I think was seen as an acceptable tradeoff given that it lets us gain a member who might have otherwise walked away.)
     
    I will be interested to see what others have to say about this, and if it’s useful I would be happy to connect you with the folks who are more familiar with this process on a day-to-day basis.
     
    -David Dwiggins
    CIO, Historic New England
     
     
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