Hey Everyone!
I work for a museum and we are trying to use flex packages as a build your own day for guests. Do any of you use flex packages in this way? I would like to pick your brain, if you do.
What I am trying to do is allow guests to basically add on two programs to their general admission. General admission is required. So I figured the best way to do this was via a flex package since it has so may features I need (requirement option for one performance and the ability to discount when a certain amount of performances are added). However, since I am doing this for daily admission, does this mean I have to do a Performance group and flex package for each day? I just want to make sure I am not making this harder on myself.
Also, I can have performances under different production seasons in the hierarchy as long as I put the Production Season to the same flex package season?
Any guidance or advice would be most helpful! Thank you!
Samantha WilsonSenior Database ManagerThe Neon Museum, Las Vegas
Hello Samantha,
I work at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, and we use flex packages in exactly that way. You need daily performances to use, and we use daily performance groups and packages for each day. I can go over this in excruciating detail if you would like to set up a call, or a zoom meeting. Have a great day.
Thomas
You do need to have a performance group for every single day and one for each add on. Currently, the easiest way to do this is to set up one perf, one performance group, and one package for one day and then use the Product Builder tool in Season Manager to copy them all. Unfortunately, the only way to build the packages and perf groups in bulk is to create the perfs at the same time. I know we told them at TLCC last year that it would be really great to have the ability to copy/create packages in bulk without having to create the perfs because for us museum orgs we don't always know what add ons will be made availale when daily admissions are initially built.
This has me super intrigued. I don't know enough about the system currently to build out something like this, but this may solve one of our huge problems which is our "Free with General Admission" vs "General Admission Included" programming.
Would this type of set-up help with our duplicate body counting situation? Currently, our process is to sell a GA ticket, then sell a $0 "Add-On" ticket into whatever program they choose to add on (docent led tour, film, concert, etc.) The problem with that set up is that now we are double counting our patrons (1 person buys 2 tickets for 1 body, so it looks like 2 bodies came into the museum). It's the age old Attendance vs Participation debate.
We have a call with our Ongoing Services team in the next week or so, and this set-up might be worth mentioning to them if it will do what I want.
You would still be issuing multiple tickets to each patron, but using flex packages can make the purchase path easier / clearer. We issue a ticket for general museum admission and now we are using a performance for each exhibition to track attendance (input after the fact, the visitor never gets a second ticket). But for reporting on the number of visitors, we only look at the general admission number. The exhibition numbers are not counted when just looking at overall visitorship. You should be able to filter out our add-ons to just get your GA ticket numbers for an overall visitor count.
So we may just have to tweak our institutional tracking a little bit. Right now we track GA and Program numbers separately and then combine the two numbers to get our total numbers of visitors. That seems to be an easy fix. I may bring up this flex package idea at our Ongoing Services meeting after all! Thanks!
Hi all-
Yes, this has always been a challenge for us non-theater folks. This isn't an immediate solution, but there is a web developer that supports 5 or 6 Tessitura organizations who has a relatively plug-n-play purchase path (that is quite customizable) that solves the problem. It builds the little bundle of choices and then dumps it into TNEW to finish the transaction in the secure Tessitura TNEW path. My prior museum used them and we use them here at the Dallas Zoo. Check out: https://lifeblue.com/
They are a great partner and I am always happy to answer any questions about them.
Here is our path: https://tickets.dallaszoo.com/guests
Mark Boyer
Director of CRM and Data Support
Dallas Zoo
650 S. R.L. Thornton Fwy.
Dallas, TX 75203-3013
Thank you everyone! This is why I love this community so much! This is helpful to know that I am on the right path for this!
Hi Thomas!
I would love to schedule a Zoom or Teams meeting with you to walk through this! My email is swilson@neonmuseum.org. Would love to connect. Thank you!!
Ah you rock! That was going to be my second question was there has to be an easier way to make these then manually! For us this process will be easier in v16 since they have the build-in add-on feature but until then flex packages it is!
Hi Samantha! We are considering this for the future as well (as one of many options). We currently use Flex Packages as a way to discount our concurrent special exhibitions (see it here: https://my.mfah.org/packages). If we do move to a GA+ or plan-your-day-model in the future, our prohibitive issue is you can only package perfs in the same Season. With our current ticketing model, guests can purchase a GA-Included ticket OR a GA-Only ticket (which we track in separate seasons). We also use Seasons to track attendance numbers (though we do track tickets issued and tickets scanned independently). So, there would have to be some pretty big changes for us. For now, our special exhibitions are in the same season, and it's not an issue.
To get around the issue Anne mentioned, we actually had a custom utility build that allows us to create packages and perf groups in bulk, using preexisting perfs. You create a template perf group or template package, and copy from there. Here are the parameters if you want to take a peek. I'm sure it wasn't cheap - but it's been an excellent tool.