Choose Your Own Order Details

Patron Edge contains a pretty nice feature that allows you to enter additional order information based on the price type chosen. While you will need to write your own reports for the captured data, you have a lot of flexibility with what it can do. Here are a few ideas for using special order details on price types:

• If your organization participates in a reciprocal membership program, create a Member price type. Then use a drop-down to select from the available reciprocal membership programs you accept and a text field to capture the membership ID. Now you can get an accurate count of how often these people come in on a weekly or monthly basis.
• If you give comp tickets to employees and staff, use a Staff price type. You can use a drop-down to record the department and have an idea of which group is coming most frequently. You could approach it a little differently and create a Comp price type, where the drop-down contains entries like Staff, Volunteer, Press, VIP, etc.
• For classes, capture registration details, emergency contact information and status of a parental release form.
• Some grants are given to arts and cultural organizations to bring in a wider range of ages or ethnicities. You can capture these fields in order to present before-and-after information to a grant provider to determine the effectiveness of the grant.
• If your constituency is mostly local or in-state, you can create a field for County to see the geographic distribution of your patrons or visitors. This will help determine where your advertising dollars would be best spent.

Here is how to set up special order details based on price type:

1. Go to Administration, System Setup, Order Type Definitions and create a new order type
2. In the Code field, enter a value greater than 100
3. Enter a description, set Ticket Level Sale to Yes, and choose the appropriate options for the remaining fields. Click OK.
4. Go to Pricing, Price Types and edit the desired price type
5. In the Order Type Definition field, select the order type created above
6. Go to Administration, System Setup, Order Type Details and create new details as needed for the new order type. If you have never added order details before, see Knowledgebase solution BB213578 for a walkthrough.

For reporting, all of this information is stored in the TicketExtraInfo table of the database. Each entry here links to the Tickets table, so you can get to any other tables you need from there. If you are not familiar with writing Crystal reports, Blackbaud provides this service (of course, cash-filled envelopes sent to my home address also work!).

How does your organization make use of order type fields? Leave a note in the comments.