Timed online ticketing for social distancing

Tong Cheng · April 2020

Can Altru sell timed ticket online?

Crystal Bruce · April 2020

Discussion moved to Altru Community. Thanks!

John Ryan · April 2020

Link?

Christina Beargie · April 2020

Well, you can certainly create a scheduled program that has program events that start at different times- in the screen where you create the events there's an option that lets you create events based on time patterns- like hourly. Then you just make those available for purchase online. You can also set limits so that they lock out of being available after a certain time before the event starts. However, I've never tried building one myself that would have a high density of events (like, hourly every day for several weeks, for example), and my feeling based on previous experience is that it's not going to be the most user-friendly experience in the web form.

We are also exploring a lot of scenarios for re-opening, and how to adjust operations to include distancing mechanics, such as timed tickets, or maybe even doing exclusively pre-sale of admission, which would probably mean we need to build scheduled programs instead of using our daily sales admission. We're still in the brainstorming phase.

Has anyone else started playing around with these options, or does anyone already have a scheduled program with a lot of instances availalbe online that they might be willing to share their link to? I'd be interested in seeing how it looks from the customer side.

Tony Millet · April 2020

Hi Christina-

At the Natural History Museum of Utah we have been using the scenario you described (series of scheduled program events instead of general admission) for almost two years in Altru. It is really easy to create the series of events. I recently created hourly admission events for July - December 2020 and the entire process probably took 10 minutes, and the actual time when I clicked Create was only a couple of seconds. You can see our ticketing page here: https://12368a.blackbaudhosting.com/12368a/page.aspx?pid=213&tab=2&txobjid=437eb683-1100-4293-ae3b-ceaf6b790eb5. You'll see on that page that the system defaults to the next available ticket date, and has a link that will allow you to select another date. (Prior to closing, our practice was for our online tickets to be valid all day, but if there were multiple times available there would also be a link to select other times.) Our standard practice is that tickets are valid for six months from the date of purchase, so if someone accidentally buys a ticket for today when they meant to buy a ticket for September, we use the reschedule process upon their arrival to move their unused tickets from their purchase date to the date and time they are actually being used, which maintains proper inventory count. I'd be happy to talk through scenarios with you if you'd like

Elizabeth Grover · April 2020

For those of you that will be using timed ticketing for daily admission, how do you "sell" tickets online to members who have free admission as part of their benefits? Specifically limiting the number of tickets by level / transaction.

Tony Millet · April 2020

Elizabeth, Altru does have a login function that you can use for members which will allow them to place tickets in their cart and checkout at no charge if their member discount reduces their cart to zero.

At NHMU we decided not to use that function, so (prior to closing in March) our members needed to appear in person in order to receive their free admission benefit. At that time there was really no risk of running out of tickets so we were not worried about it. For the last year or so we have been working with a company called Social Good Software and they are developing an overlay login function that works with the Altru API and will allow us to control some functions like this on the periphery or Altru but all reflected within Altru once the transaction is complete. I don't know whether this will be ready for us by the time we reopen, since we've all lost focus on this project for the time being, as you might imagine.

Bill Carey · April 2020

Tony Millet:

Elizabeth, Altru does have a login function that you can use for members which will allow them to place tickets in their cart and checkout at no charge if their member discount reduces their cart to zero.

At NHMU we decided not to use that function, so (prior to closing in March) our members needed to appear in person in order to receive their free admission benefit. At that time there was really no risk of running out of tickets so we were not worried about it. For the last year or so we have been working with a company called Social Good Software and they are developing an overlay login function that works with the Altru API and will allow us to control some functions like this on the periphery or Altru but all reflected within Altru once the transaction is complete. I don't know whether this will be ready for us by the time we reopen, since we've all lost focus on this project for the time being, as you might imagine.

Tony,

Thank you for the link to your advance admission sales page and for mentioning you are working with Social Good Software. We recently had them install Google Tag Manager on our Altru Web Forms in a manner that doesn't break the forms' functionality, and so far, so good. While I appreciate that there are companies like Social Good partnering with Blackbaud to add functionality to Altru, the fact that we as Altru clients feel compelled to contract with a third party to get workable solutions for our customers demonstrates - in my mind - the lack of attention and resources Blackbaud is devoting to Altru in general. It seems like an afterthought for them at times, which is pretty disappointing.

OK, I'll get off my soapbox now. Apologies for the thread hijacking.

Vicki Cotton · April 2020

We are also trying to set up timed member admission. I see how it can be done as a program, but can't ind how I could created timed entry $0 tickets for Members as an admission program. This brings up the problem, if I have a program for members where they can get timed admission tickets, AND have an online ticket admission feature for regular people, there does not seem a way for these 2 solutions to work together. I can see a situation where we sell out all the member timed tickets, but still have an unlimited number of regular tickets for sale, so we hav enow overloaded our facility.

Any suggestions?

Maggie Peck · May 2020

Vicki Cotton:

We are also trying to set up timed member admission. I see how it can be done as a program, but can't ind how I could created timed entry $0 tickets for Members as an admission program. This brings up the problem, if I have a program for members where they can get timed admission tickets, AND have an online ticket admission feature for regular people, there does not seem a way for these 2 solutions to work together. I can see a situation where we sell out all the member timed tickets, but still have an unlimited number of regular tickets for sale, so we hav enow overloaded our facility.

Any suggestions?

You can set up a scheduled program for timed ticketing and add discounts for members in the Discount tab. Members will have to log in to your website in order for the discount to register, but it should allow them to purchase timed tickets through the same program you're using for non-members.

Jennifer LaGuardia · May 2020

Has anyone who offers discounts on general admission decided if they are offering the discounts with the timed ticket and are you changing your current pricing structure? If you will offer discounts and are only selling online admission, how will you get the discount codes to the patrons?

Thanks for your ideas and thoughts

Jennifer LaGuardia

Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Christina DelGaizo · June 2020

We are also planning to re-open with timed online ticketing and I would love some feedback on the following scenario:

I revised our general admission program (it has always been a daily scheduled program) to hourly timeslots with the added online sales method. However, our box office wants the ability to reserve some tickets in each timeslot for them to sell through Daily Sales in case patrons show up and need tickets but that timeslot is sold out. I don't see any way to limit ticket sales by only the online sales method. If I create a secondary admission daily program for the front desk to use when a scheduled program timeslot is at capacity, would that work without causing some major attendance reporting problem (or any other problems that I'm not foreseeing)? Or is there a better method for this that I haven't thought of?

Thank you!

Christina

John Ryan · July 2020

We're doing several things to handle our timed ticketing that relate to questions here:

We created two timed entry admission programs, one for online sales and one for walk in visitors. We split the ticket capacity between the two but also have the ability to sell the online tickets to walk in visitors if available to avoid "wasting" them. Online tickets can be purchased right to the start time for each time block. On site can be sold up to 15 minutes into the block.
We attached our member discounts to both programs to allow members to receive their free tickets either online (after registering) or in person. We use discounts to make member tickets free rather than having $0 amount tickets which made this easy to manage.
We are using that walk in capacity to handle those with discounts that would be difficult to accommodate in online sales (typically the manual discounts but also our Library pass program and a variety of free passes). The other option would be to create and have a way to provide promotion codes to all of those potential visitors, a rather unwieldy process for our small team.

Timed online ticketing for social distancing

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