June 2008 - Posts
On a busy day, every second counts when making a sale. Long lines make patrons impatient and a bad enough waiting experience can even be enough to prevent someone from coming back to visit you. Lines at theme parks are so bad nowadays, my wife and I don't even bother anymore. With that in mind, here are five tips that can help you cut mouse clicks and seconds from every transaction:
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Remember price types when buying several events at once
Patron Edge has a Company setting called Ignore Price Type Reordering. Set this to No, and what will happen is that when you choose a price type and tickets for the first event in a transaction, it will remember that price type for all subsequent events in the sale (if it's available). This should save at least a couple of clicks per transaction if you have a lot of patrons who buy several events at once
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Use the touch screen
If you are a general admission organization, use the touch screen for sales. You can remove at least 3 mouse clicks per transaction by using the GA sales screen instead of the standard screen.
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Use shortcut keysIf you are a reserved seating or mixed organization, the GA screen doesn't do you any good. But the standard sales screen in Patron Edge has a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Check out our
User Guides page for a cheat sheet you can post next to the cashiers' monitors, called the
Sales Keyboard Shortcut Reference Sheet.
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Trim payment method optionsIn the payment screen, there are a lot of payment methods available by default. It's likely that you will never find yourself using several of these. To declutter the screen, go to Administration, User Setup, Profiles and turn off unused pay methods. You can see Knowledgebase solution
BB198026 for detailed steps if you are unfamiliar with editing profiles.
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Create a cash-only lineFor popular events and big on-sales, having a line dedicated to cash transactions can help keep lines short. If it's advertised well enough, it may even prompt patrons to come visit with cash in hand, sparing them long lines and saving you money on credit card fees. While you're at it,
configure your cash drawers to pop before receipts print; the cashier will have the chance to make change while a receipt prints and can then hand both change and receipt to the patron at once, shaving precious seconds from a transaction.
I'm sure you've come up with other tips and techniques to minimize wait time. What has worked best for your organization? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
You've used Patron Edge for a while, gotten the hang of Marketing Mailing, and are pretty good at generating lists for brochures and email blasts. But have you considered the possibility of using the system to send out an SMS blast to the mobile phones of your subscribers? In the past, if you wanted to send email to a mobile phone, you had to figure out how to format the email address properly in order to hit the phone, and of course every carrier uses a different format. There's a free service out called Flipout (by California-based company Teleflip) that lets you send an email - like 8432166200@teleflip.com - and it is sent to the phone as an SMS.
To use:
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Create your list via Marketing Mailing and save it as a CSV file. Make sure that you're using the Restrictions feature of Patron Edge and only sending messages to patrons who have opted in. Receiving unsolicited text messages is one of my pet peeves, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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Open the file in
Calc or Excel and strip out any characters like parentheses or hyphens. This is easy to do with a quick Find and Replace
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Append the text '@teleflip.com' to the end of the phone numbers. This can be done by adding a new column that contains only this text and then using a simple Concatenate formula. See
this link for an example if you do not know how to concatenate fields
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Use your favorite email merge application to send out the message.
You have to get a little creative with the CSV file, but once you've done it a time or two it becomes second nature. Are you currently sending text messages of any kind to your patrons? What are the reactions or what techniques are most effective? Leave a message in the comments.
Firefox, the greatest of the modern browsers, released version 3 of their product just about four hours ago and it has already been downloaded nearly 3 million (million!) times. It's more secure, prettier, faster and smarter than anything else out there (yes, even you Safari). I encourage all of you to download and use it exclusively for a better browsing experience. If you need to access your Patron Edge Online Administration Site, you can install the excellent IETab extension and do it all in one browser. With this extension I don't think I've purposely launched Internet Explorer in two or three years, and haven't had run-ins with malware of any kind. And now it even integrates with web apps. For example, I can click a mailto link and it will launch my Gmail composer.
For those who have done a fair amount of PEO design work and had to do any special browser-specific tweaks to make things look the way you want, make sure to test your site in this newest version to ensure that your patrons won't experience any display issues. The US and Canada together have almost hit the one million download mark, so you can be sure that your patrons are using it already.
It's patch day! Okay, technically the patch came out Friday afternoon, but I wanted to update all related Knowledgebase solutions before posting here. Patch 6 is now available for download at http://downloads.blackbaud.com and includes fixes for the following reported issues:
BB330410 - Error: Series price recalculation failed because the event price level is not defined for the respective series
BB421724 - Error: There are no records that match the search criteria
BB415166 - Subscriber Ticket Balance report cuts off phone numbers
BB461888 - Event Capacity Breakdown is incorrect when using Seat Information and a Seat Lock on the same seat
BB360980 - Payment Method (Comprehensive) includes all payment types when running in 'Summarized' mode
BB387860 - Return to original date option does not work
BB389402 - Series locks do not work on event level
BB421928 - Sales Breakdown by Event report missing the Issued # column when exported to Excel
BB430400 - Display Payments and Display Sales options on the Transactions By Group tab are only available to users with the System Administrator profile
BB435800 - Error: 3421 Description: Application uses a value of the wrong type for the current operation. Source: ADODB.Parameter Proc: frmSearch.FillGrid Line: 0
BB436616 - Seat attribute border color does not show up for users able to sell locked tickets
BB456026 - Series seats appear as 'Occupied by Event'
BB456290 - Sale Date is not updated for event tickets when confirming a reserved series
BB456326 - Client Listing by Seat Report does not display results in alphabetical order
BB457190 - Number of visits is incorrect on the Zip Code Anaylsis Report
BB469172 - Error: 91 Description: Object variable or With block variable not set
Make sure you have a patch plan and can handle the downtime it takes to apply a patch, and don't forget to see Knowledgebase solution BB346664 to make sure any products you integrate with are compatible.
Tomorrow morning I'm heading up to the lovely mountains of North Carolina with my wife for our second wedding anniversary. But fear not, I'll be back in action next Monday!
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.
While thinking about ways to get people more involved with an organization's online presence, I realized that most websites give an opportunity to leave feedback about the website itself. The best way to improve usability is to talk with users, right? I’ve done this with ING Direct, Netflix and a handful of other sites to let them know about bad links or usability issues. Often I leave positive feedback, just to let an organization know that I appreciate a new feature or change to their site that has made my life easier.
So following that line of thought, I whipped this up one evening while watching reruns of Scrubs. It is a new page for Patron Edge Online that allows a person to enter her name, email (if desired) and thoughts about your site. Now that version 3.3.3 has been released, I also threw in an accompanying custom report that can be generated to allow your web marketer or webmaster to review feedback on demand.
You can view a screenshot of what the page looks like here. As always, play with it on a test interface first! This feature is pretty basic (and potentially very valuable) but keep in mind that it is not supported. To install:
1. Download this ZIP file and extract the contents
2. Add Feedback_Form.asp and insert_feedback.asp to your public\bbcustomizations folder
3. If you do not have the Custom Site Settings table yet (from earlier PEO Labs articles), run Create Custom Site Settings Table.sql against your PEO database
4. Run LeaveFeedback.sql against your PEO database to create the custom table that will hold the actual comments
5. Create a new screen called Feedback
6. Create a new screen part on the Feedback screen (INCLUDE is the type) that points to bbcustomizations\Feedback_Form.asp
7. Edit the feedbackheader CSS class so that it matches your site’s overall design
You can also import the Site Feedback Report into the Custom Reports section of the Administration Site, or review the feedback via the Custom Tables folder.
Are you currently using any method of capturing user feedback about your website? How has it affected your design or business processes? Leave a message in the comments.
I know, I know, my posting frequency has dropped off a bit in the last couple of weeks. I've been a little swamped and unable to write as much as I'd like. I haven't forgotten about you though! Things are settling back down and I want to get back to my two or three a week schedule, but I don't want to bore you so I need some feedback. What do you want to hear about? Do I need to post more on Patron Edge features and tricks vs Patron Edge Online? Are you getting anything out of the PEO Labs series?
The reason for The Spotlight is to get out new ideas and techniques to help run your admissions desk, guest services area or box office more smoothly, and I want to make sure that I'm being relevant to what you need. Don't worry, this isn't a cop out post or anything, I've been working on a new PEO feature in my off time that I'll debut here on The Spotlight this afternoon!
One of the easiest things you can do to protect your organization online is to ensure the security of your Patron Edge Online Administration site. I bring this up because the majority of Admin sites that I have seen are not well-protected. While an attacker wouldn’t be able to get credit card numbers or anything of that nature via the Administration site, there’s still a lot of potential for mischief, or even damage. An attacker could bring down your site by changing Site Settings, redirect all your menu items to a different site, or all kinds of other bad stuff.
Luckily, beefing up security is pretty easy. There are three key things to do, and your system administrator will be able to handle all of them in a matter of minutes.
Change your password - This literally takes seconds but I have seen people who have used PEO for years and still log in with the default login and password. To change the password, go to Administration, System Setup, System Users. Double-click on Supervisor and enter a new password. Done!
Have different Windows accounts run the public and admin sites - When using anonymous authentication for your website, the Administration site account should not be the same as the public site account. The default account for anonymous authentication is Internet Guest Account (also called IUSR_MachineName). Keep this one for the public site and use a different one for the Admin site, since it needs greater write and edit privileges on the public site folder. Even better, turn off anonymous access to the Admin site altogether and use Windows Integrated Authentication so that only members of your network are able to get as far as the PEO Admin login page.
Lock down rights to Administration site pieces - Create logins for each person who needs access (done in the same place where you changed your password above). Then determine what each person should be able to see. Generally a content creator only needs access to the Site Design and Events sections so turn off their ability to get to other administrative pieces.
What other measures are you taking to secure your website? Leave a message in the comments.