Hi everyone,
A few of us had a chat about visitor figure tracking in Tessitura at TLCC London a few weeks back so I thought it might be helpful to throw this question out to the wider group.
As part of our visitor reporting, we monitor visitor attendance across a range of data points. Some of these are data we are already collecting in Tessitura (admission ticket purchases and attendance, exhibition and event ticket purchases and attendance) and others are data that is collected outside of Tessitura (people counting software, manual clickers, free school visits, etc).
We are embarking on a project to review the data points we report on and as part of this I would like to explore the potential of collecting more, if not all, in Tessitura. At present we have a number of spreadsheets where we plug in figures each day which risks human error and in users changing the figures regularly resulting in a lack of faith in the figures. Ideally we'd capture the data in Tessitura so we can use Analytics and reach a single source of truth for our visitor numbers and track our progress against targets.
I know that some ideas out there include hard coding data into Analytics, using custom tables or creating daily performances where people counting figures can be recorded through selling tickets. Can anyone share their experience of using Tessitura for visitor figures reporting and the strengths and weaknesses of their approach?
Many thanks
Hannah
Hi Hannah - I'd would have loved to be part of that conversation! At Auckland Museum we use ticketing to count what we refer to as 'Transactional Visitation.' We use a single daily performance, General Admission, with ticket types combined with mode of sale to understand visitor type.
We have a lot of admission price types covering education, group bookings, international & local visitors.
Admission is added to all orders. Everyone is ticketed (not always printed) into admissions regardless of if they are paying or are free. We do this for 2 reasons.
Firstly it allows a base count of the visitors - someone can purchase tickets to attend multiple perfs but they are still one person. If a visitor goes on a guided tour and to an exhibition, they are a single visitor to us, so by counting the admission line only, we can make sure we are not duplicating visitor numbers.
Secondly we capture visitor origin against admission through surveys. This means that we are able to understand local vs rest of country vs international visitation.
As school & group bookings are currently pre booked, the team add admission lines to each of those type of orders when they are taken, in the relevant mode of sale. The mode of sale is like an income stream to us, so we know where the visitor numbers & income are coming from.
While this has worked for us for quite a while now, the challenge of making this work online for is always something we've struggled with, using TNEW, unless we package everything, which we don't. I am hopeful that the 'add on' functionality coming with V16 may help resolve some of the issues here though.
We still have some numbers that are not ticketed that we also add after the perf has taken place - these are usually 'activations' (educator lead drop in sessions within the museum) that someone will take a manual count of those visitors in attendance & we'll add that number later to Tessitura for reporting purposes. Those visitors would already have an admission ticket, so it's not required for that reporting - just education reporting on activities held. It would be great for that team, who have no ticketing experience, to have an easy way of getting those type of numbers into Tessitura, rather than having to send info to the box office for entry though.
We still use people counting software as there are 'visitors' to the museum that may come in to the retail store, or the cafe & not come in to the galleries. Our reporting always includes both numbers, Camera counts & Transactional counts. Camera counts are always higher but the difference is usually pretty much the same gap. This helps us validate each count. When there is a larger than usual gap, we know we need to look into things to see if there was an issue somewhere.
Looking forward seeing how others handle this!
Hi Hannah,
I think we had a pretty extensive chat re: Targets tracking in Tessitura. I'll write a few notes below:
We are using analytics functionality to import our footfall targets into a widget on a budget tracking dashboard. There are other less manual solutions, but this works fairly well for us, we just have to currently refresh the targets quarterly as Analytics isn't really built to hold this many manual case statements. I'm sure there might be a better way of doing it along the same lines but we are are just doing the best we can with the tools we've got!
Our widgets look like this sample below-- the gold line is the footfall targets that we have manually imported into Analytics and the red is a really simple Tickets Sold filtered by prod season:
The formulas I am using to import the targets are as follows, for example:
CASEWHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 203 THEN 7672WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 204 THEN 7672WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 205 THEN 7658WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 206 THEN 8297WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 209 THEN 7599WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 210 THEN 8142WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 211 THEN 7657WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 212 THEN 7793WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 213 THEN 9337WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 216 THEN 8152WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 217 THEN 9256WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 218 THEN 8544WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 219 THEN 8833WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 220 THEN 9785WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 223 THEN 9176WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 224 THEN 9437WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 225 THEN 8559WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 226 THEN 9412WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 227 THEN 9323WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 230 THEN 9337WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 231 THEN 9323WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 232 THEN 9096WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 233 THEN 9244WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 234 THEN 9245WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 237 THEN 8661WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 238 THEN 9357WHEN [Total Calendar Day Of Year] = 239 THEN 7801
ELSE 0END
Total Calendar Day of Year is Performance Date, then the number of the date of the year, and then the footfall target after THEN.
This is done with a fairly rudimentary knowledge of SQL so feel free to improve upon what I've done here! But basically that is how we do it. I'm using an excel file to concatenate the values so that I'm not actually writing the lines myself.
Just another note that you can't use the break by function or it doesn't allow you to show more than one value. It took me ages to figure that out! So it is worth keeping the widget as simple as possible.
Best of luck and hope it helps!
Also sorry to hijack your thread but if you're in support, please upvote my idea on the ideas board! (28) Footfall Tracking for Museums (Tickets Sold) - Ideas - Ideas - Tessitura Network
Hi Jo,
This is really useful, thank you so much. When you say that everyone is ticketed, do you mean that all visitors either book online ahead of attending or you book them in when they arrive? And all of these visitors have an "admission" ticket added to their order as well as the event/tour/exhibition they are booking for?
When you add the non ticketed numbers (the activations and others) and the camera counts, how do you do this? Do you also add these as tickets at the end of the day?
I've been playing with adding the camera counts as tickets however have found this clunky/slow as these numbers run into several thousands a day for us. I'd love to know if I'm missing a trick there (I'm still very new to Tessitura!)
Thanks
Thank you so much for your notes! Yes we had a really good chat at TLCC so I appreciate you setting this all out as you have. Your formula will be really helpful, we're not yet at the point of having daily targets but I could certainly use something similar for monthly targets. I had considered using hold codes to show the target number (something the RA mention they do in the Analytics webinar this week) but that wouldn't work as well for monthly targets.
I've upvoted your idea! Thanks again,
Hi Hannah - everyone that comes to an event, education programme or group booking etc gets issued with an admission ticket. Currently if someone buys an event ticket online then we add the admission ticket once they are onsite. Hopefully we'll change that once using v16 & able to use the 'add on function' in TNEW. We currently don't have the camera software in analytics but it's something that I know other places have done - at TLCC 2019 the Science Museum Group & others presented 'Tessitura Integrations: Connecting Third Party Data' which you should still be able to find in the conference archives, but if you can't let me know jbramley@aucklandmuseum.com & I can send you a copy which maybe more work in the short term but much less than having to add them daily as tickets forever!