April 2008 - Posts
The internet behemoth that is Google has given us a great tool to get people into your doors, literally. Google Maps is at a point now where there is no reason not to have an interactive map and driving directions to your venue. It’s also a very simple feature to implement using some basic PEO design concepts. Let’s walk through adding a map with driving directions to your site.
Get the code for the map
Go to http://maps.google.com, enter the address of your venue and perform a search. In the resulting map, click ‘Link to this page’. Click ‘Customize and preview embedded map’ and you’ll get this screen. Choose the desired map size and then copy all the HTML onto the clipboard.
Create a new Directions page on the PEO site
Go into Site Design, Screens and create a new screen called Directions. Due to sizing, I recommend using Template 2. After creating the screen, use the Screen Part Location Tool to create a new HTML:Free screen part. Click the button in the Text field to bring up the HTML editor. Now click the button to insert HTML and paste in the code you copied earlier. Click OK when finished.
Create a link to the Directions page
To access this page, link to it as you would any custom screen. If you aren’t sure how to create that link, just take a look at this post.
Throw some text on there with your contact information and any special notes (handicapped parking, etc) and you’ve got a simple, easy to use directions page for your patrons. Are you using any web mapping applications already for this or another purpose? Share your experiences in the comments.
So you've installed Google Analytics for Patron Edge Online already and now your marketing folks want to start an advertising campaign to increase awareness of your website and drive your patrons toward more self-service options. So where is that advertising time and money best spent? One of the features of Google Analytics is that it allows you to add extra information to a link so you can determine how a person got to your site. So before you send out an email blast, tag the link with information and then let GA crunch the numbers for you. Here is an example tag I would use for an email blast: http://tickets.mysite.org/default.asp?utm_source=mysite&utm_medium=email. You can also add keyword information if you purchased keywords somewhere and a "content" tag if you're sending out two or three different versions of the same email. To save time creating your links, use this link builder provided by Google.
There is a lot of power here, so try to get really specific on your sources and you can find out exactly where you should be spending advertising money. If you are linking from a separate content website, use a specific link there. If you have two people who blog about your organization, give them each a unique link. Nothing pleases a blogger more than the knowledge that someone is reading and acting on his advice! Have you already tried this technique? Leave a note or success story in the comments.
Hi all, it's patch day! Patch 4 is now available for download at http://downloads.blackbaud.com and includes fixes for the following reported issues:
BB449756 - Closed drawer report has incorrect amounts after a series ticket was exchanged for a single ticket
BB452348 - Error: operation denied. The show '' has no free places anymore
BB452942 - Client preference is restricted to any user group, it restricts it from everybody from editing client preferences
BB453590 - Payment of external voucher causes PE to crash
BB447561 - Distributor Sales report display shows in non sequential order
Our patches also sometimes contain fixes to issues that were found by QA folks or designers and so wouldn't have a Knowledgebase solution associated with them. My advice with patching PE is that, if it doesn't create too much downtime for you, then go ahead and stay on the latest patch. Have a good weekend!
So I was given an internal cleanup project that had a spreadsheet of 500 items that needed to be reviewed and acted on. As I worked through the list over the course of a couple of weeks, I color-coded the items based on the next action to take (follow up, merge, close, etc). At the end of the project I wanted to sort the spreadsheet by color, only to discover that Excel can't do this! Well, being the curious sort I started exploring the option of doing it with a VBA macro. Using a combination of web searches and help files, I put this macro together:
Sub ColorSort()
Dim ColorValue
Dim LastRow
Dim LastColumn
LastRow = Cells.Find(What:="*", After:=[A1], SearchDirection:=xlPrevious).Row
LastColumn = Cells.Find(What:="*", After:=[A1], SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, SearchDirection:=xlPrevious).Column
For i = 2 To LastRow
ColorValue = Cells(i, LastColumn).Offset(0, -1).Interior.ColorIndex
Cells(i, LastColumn).Value = ColorValue
Next i
End Sub
You just need to create a column at the end of your worksheet and call it "Color" or something like that. Next, run the macro; it assigns a number based on the background color of the row. You can then sort the worksheet by the "Color" column, and voila!
While this isn't directly Patron Edge or Patron Edge Online related, it has become such a great tool for me I thought some of you might find it helpful as well. Maybe you've had an event get cancelled and you get a phone list through Marketing Mailing that someone is color-coding. Maybe you are using the Raiser's Edge export module and working with a spreadsheet it kicked out. Or maybe you're doing something completely non-work-related and you find a use for this. If this macro helps you save some time, leave a comment for others to see!
The PEO Labs series brings you information or advice on items that are geared towards users who can take high-level concepts or sample code and run with them. Please note that many of the things discussed are not supported. That doesn't mean that an item is a warranty-voider; it just means that the Support Analysts can't walk you through it or troubleshoot it if it breaks.
For those who are not familiar, a favicon is the icon that shows up in your bookmarks toolbar for a saved site, and in the address bar/tab header of your web browser when visiting a site. It's a 16x16 icon that you can use as another way to reinforce your organization's "brand" on the web.
For those of you know know all about these, I'm sure your question is, "when do we get this functionality in Patron Edge Online?" You can actually do it right now. I have found some great resources online that will allow you to add a favicon onto your current PEO site regardless of version. Here's the scoop:
Create a favicon for your site
If you don't already have a favicon, you need to create an ICO image file that is at least 16x16 pixels. Your marketing folks should be able to handle something like this pretty easily, or you can use some free tools on the web. Here are a couple of sites that can do this for you:
Add files to to your web server
There are three files that you need in order to make this work:
- The image file itself. I recommend placing it in the public\Images folder of your website
- This ZIP file. It contains an HTML page and a JavaScript library (and a screenshot for later). Place the HTML and JS files in your public\bbCustomizations folder. If you are interested in the technical bits of the JS library, there is a link to the author's website in its comments.
Modify favicon.htm to point to your icon
Edit favicon.htm in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor. If your custom piece folder is not called bbCustomizations, you will need to edit the first line accordingly so that the page can find the JavaScript library. Now edit the sixth line and replace the URL here with the location of your favicon file.
Add a reference to the file on your Admin Site
In Site Design, edit each of the Templates of the Interface you are using and create a new screen part for them. See the screenshot from the above ZIP file if you need an example screen part to help you. Since this is a script, no text will be visible on the page itself, so the dimensions of the screen part don't matter at all.
Do you use favicons on your main or ticketing websites? How has it reinforced your organization's image? Leave a note in the comments!
Before I get to the important stuff, lemme quickly introduce myself. I’m Justin Baden, a Technical Writer here at Blackbaud. I currently work on help content for The Patron Edge and The Patron Edge Online. As Nicholai recently mentioned, version 3.33 of The Patron Edge Online is now available and with it comes a slew of new features, including a shiny new UI for the administration site. For a rundown of each new feature, check out the PEO 3.33 Update Guide.
Along with the 3.33 release comes new and improved documentation. If you haven’t accessed the PEO docs recently, head over to the user guides page for a fresh look. In addition to user guide PDFs, we now have an online searchable helpfile that you can access here. Feel free to bookmark the link and access the helpfile often. We’ll continue to add new content and update it on a regular basis. And since it’s hosted online, you’ll always access the most up-to-date version.
We still have some work to do… the helpfile is currently a standalone resource accessed outside of the product UI. We plan to integrate it into the PEO administration site for a future release. In the meantime, we hope to provide a way for you to integrate help into your admin site on your own (if you'd like to) without waiting for said future release. More on that later…
So if you get a chance, check out the latest PEO docs and the searchable helpfile and then let us now what you think in the comments. And if you have a few extra minutes, we also have a documentation survey that's pretty quick and will help us continue to improve help content. Plus, if you take the survey, you’re entered to win a $25 Amazon gift certificate. Not bad…
Different research tells us that the average online shopper will wait between four and 10 seconds for a page to load before giving up. One decent article I’ve managed to find indicates that the number is much closer to four than 10. And US broadband penetration is currently in the 80% range (scheduled to hit 90% by mid-year), so keep in mind when designing your site that two out of every ten of your potential patrons are visiting you via dial-up.
So what can you do to make your Patron Edge Online site a little zippier? First, visit this page load tester to see how fast your site currently loads. It’s good to have a starting point so that you can gauge what techniques are most effective for you. I’ve included a few ideas to get you started, but a quick web search will pull up dozens more ways to make your site load faster without sacrificing quality. Come in before the box office opens one day, take a half hour and try a couple of the following:
- Use CSS whenever possible. Putting your site design into the CSS file instead of using inline HTML style tags will improve load time, as the CSS is loaded once and then cached in the browser for the rest of your session. If you start with a main site for content management and then link into your PEO site, combine the two CSS files into one.
- Optimize the images on your site. Excessive or oversized images are one of the biggest causes of a slow load time. JPEGs are the largest and slowest image files to load. GIFs are generally better, but if you can, I recommend putting your images in PNG format. PNG files tend to have the smallest footprint without sacrificing image quality. There are plenty of free image converters out there, many that don’t even require you to download any software.
- For show images, don’t use the same file for the small image on PEO that you use for the medium image. Otherwise you are just hurting your load time when the default PEO page loads by downloading a bigger image that then gets scaled down in the browser.
- If you are linking to a directory instead of a specific page, put a slash at the end of the link so the web server doesn’t have to try to figure that part out. http://mysite.org/tickets/ will load faster than http://mysite.org/tickets.
Other ideas to speed up your website? Please post them in the comments.
With our new release of Patron Edge Online version 3.33, we have a feature that allows you to export your print at home ticket designs from one PEO database and import them into another. This is really handy if you have a separate live and test environment and are tired of buying tickets in the live system over and over while tweaking your design. But it’s also an opportunity for those of you with a flair for design to show off your handiwork to other organizations. Here’s what to do:
- On the Administration Site, go to Content, Site Design
- Highlight the ticket and click Export on the toolbar
- Click OK and then choose where you want to save it
Importing is just as easy. Just click the Import button, browse to the report file and click OK. Now start sharing!
Shooting designs back and forth on our web forum can spark creativity and get organizations thinking of new ways to connect with their audiences. Do you have a ticket design you’d love to show off? Leave a link in the comments or post your design in the PE forum!
The PEO Labs series brings you information or advice on items that are geared towards users who can take high-level concepts or sample code and run with them. Please note that many of the things discussed are not supported. That doesn't mean that an item is a warranty-voider; it just means that the Support Analysts can't walk you through it or troubleshoot it if it breaks.
Google has a powerful, free tool available, called Google Analytics, that will allow you to collect all kinds of aggregate data about your site's visitors. You can use this information to:
- Track the geographic location of site visitors to plan where to spend your advertising dollars
- Determine what page a visitor hits first on your site and how long he spends there
- See what sites or search engines are referring patrons to you
- Look for trends to see if parts of your site are confusing or cumbersome to visitors
- Discover how many times a visitor comes to your site before making a purchase
I'm not a marketer or a webmaster, but I'm sure there are a hundred other uses you can come up with for this tool. There is a nice demo on their site here that walks you through what the tool can do and how it works. This probably leaves you with some questions. How much does it cost? How long will it take to implement? How do you actually make it happen?
How much does it cost?
According to the Google Analytics site, use of the service is free if you get less than five million (million!) pageviews per month.
How long will it take to get started?
Getting an account with Google Analytics takes a few minutes, and adding it into PEO only a little longer. I would plan for 30 minutes to an hour for the whole project, plus any time you spend playing with settings and setting up reports in your Google Analytics account.
How do I do it?
- First, you need to sign up for an account. Once you sign up, you receive something called a Tracking Code. Hold on to this as we will need it again soon.
- Download this file and place it in the bbCustomizations folder of your public site.
- Edit line six of the file, replacing "UA-xxxx-x" with the Tracking Code you got in step one.
- On the PEO Admin site, go into Site Design and edit all of the screens of the interface you are using. In the Include After field, enter bbCustomizations\GAnalytics.htm. This is the part that can take a little while, depending on how many screens you have.
And you're finished! That wasn't so difficult, was it? After you have this all set up in Patron Edge Online, you will definitely want to go back into your Google Analytics account and do some tweaking so that the data it captures for you is more accurate.
You have some opportunities to get really advanced with this if you'd like by tagging the URLs that you send out in your marketing campaigns. For example, tagging your email blasts with things like campaign information will help you determine which ones are most effective. My site is internal only, so I haven't been able to try tagging to verify it plays nicely with PEO, but let me know if you try it out and how well it works. How are you using analytical/statistical data to drive your mission? Leave a message in the comments.
One of the nice things about PEO is that a patron receives an email confirmation of an order as soon as it has been placed. While a receipt usually suffices for a walk-up sale, this is definitely useful for phone sales. Imagine having the opportunity to send a patron an email confirming his phone order as soon as he hangs up. This helps catch misunderstandings so that the wrong tickets don't get put in the mail or the Will Call box. You can resolve the issue early instead of day-of-show, and it really reinforces an image of professionalism at your organization.
Patron Edge already has this functionality, and it's pretty easy to set up and get going. Here's the short version:
Configure the SMTP Server and PE Administration settings - The only catch with the SMTP server is that it must be set to use anonymous authentication. In PE, there are a few Company settings to set things like the Reply To address and the mailing type of the confirmation (to record to a patron's Mailing History).
Create the Tix Print Server and document design - Email confirmations work just like physical documents; a Tix Print Server is how they get sent from PE to the SMTP server. The document design is a stored procedure and a Crystal Report. We have provided a sample, but with knowledge of Crystal you can do whatever you'd like with the design.
Set the subject line and body of the email - These are boilerplate text, and the confirmation itself is an attachment to this email.
Configure sales point printing and print options - This is just like a regular printer as well; I'm sure you've been through this several times after buying new ticket or receipt printers.
That's the gist of it. You can get from start to finish in under an hour on setting this up if you're pretty familiar with PE Administration, and the full walkthrough is located in Chapter 5 of the Document Design Guide.
Are you currently using confirmation emails in Patron Edge? Have your patrons had any comments about it? Leave a comment and share your experiences.
PEO is top-notch as far as its ticketing portion goes, but it’s also a pretty decent content management tool. Maybe you want to add some extra pages or maybe you even want to use PEO as the platform for your entire site and do all content management through the Administration Site. Doing this isn’t too difficult due to a tool we have called the screen loader.
Canned PEO screens have a lot of extra “stuff” that goes on in the background, so if you’ve ever added a screen to your site and it did not load or gave errors, it’s because this stuff is missing. To account for that, we use the screen loader. Here is how it works:
- Create your my_new_screen.htm in an HTML editor and drop it into your site folder
- On the Admin site, go to Site Design, Screens and create a new screen for your interface. Mine will be named My_Screen
- Use the screen part location tool or drill into the screen to create a new screen part. The Type will be INCLUDE and the File will be my_new_screen.htm
- Now when you want to link to this page, call it like this: http://tickets.mysite.org/public/load_screen.asp?screen=my_screen
- If you’re linking to the custom screen from a non-PEO site, you will need to use the loader tool, as discussed in this post. Your link will look like: http://tickets.mysite.org/public/loader.asp?target=load_screen.asp?screen=my_screen
Now you have custom content on your PEO site without a lot of fuss (or paying a lot of money!). You don’t have to create your own ASP or HTML pages either. If you prefer, you can create a screen and then build HTML:Element screen parts for it using the designer in PEO. For this situation, there is no File Name for your screen or your screen parts, so just set this field to the same value as your Name field.
Have you created any custom screens? Do you use PEO as a platform for your entire site? Share your experiences in the comments.
PEO Labs: The idea behind the PEO Labs series is to bring you information or advice on items that are geared towards users who can take high-level concepts or sample code and run with them. Please note that many of the things discussed are not supported. That doesn't mean that an item is a warranty-voider; it just means that the Support Analysts can't walk you through it or troubleshoot it if it breaks.
Graphic design firms show off web portfolios; builders display photos of their finished buildings; even bands put up mp3 samples, wallpapers and screen savers. What kind of multimedia to you put into your PEO site to boost ticket sales? Are you currently using any at all?
Sometimes a photo is enough to get people interested when, say, a traveling art exhibit visits your musuem. But what if you’re a theatre or a symphony and you know that a single photo just can’t capture the spirit of what you are bringing to the world? If you want to get your patrons really interested in what’s going on, it’s time to add some multimedia and make your site really pop. Here are three great ways to give your patrons a more immersive experience on your site and a good taste of what they’ll see and hear when they come to visit.
Photo - This option is great for any organization, but museums especially can take advantage of some of the photo hosting sites out there that provide slideshow abilities. There are a couple of awesome tools I recommend that allow you to create a Flickr slideshow without any real programming knowledge. The first is FlickrSLiDR and is simple to use. If you feel like you need a little more flexibility, check out the PictoBrowser, which is also very Web 2.0 but has a couple more options than FlickrSLiDR.
Video - YouTube has made it ridiculously easy to upload video clips and even edit them on the fly to some extent. You can then use the provided URL to link from your PEO site to the clip, or even better use the Embed link and add the video directly into a show’s Long Description.
Audio - If you’re thinking about adding mp3 samples to your site, I recommend using Audacity. It’s free, open-source (I’m a big fan of FOSS) and easy to use.
Now get out there and put some cool multimedia onto your site, and be sure to leave a link in the comments so others can see what you’ve done!