The Spotlight

Save Time by Deploying RE Integration Files

2008-08-21T20:11:00Z

Two of the most time consuming things with any client-server application are installations and updates. If you have both Patron Edge and The Raiser's Edge, you currently have an additional step after installing an RE workstation (or updating a PE workstation) to copy some files into the The Raiser's Edge\DRE folder and register a DLL. Without performing this step after each PE update, you risk breaking the integration with RE:Export. In order to make life a little bit easier, I have created a small tool that will allow you to perform this process with one click. In a nutshell, it does the following:

Locates your Patron Edge Deploy folder
Determines where The Raiser's Edge is installed on the workstation
Creates the DRE folder if necessary
Adds CustomNodes.xml, overwriting the existing copy if necessary
Adds and registers PEExport.dll, overwriting the existing copy if necessary

While not an official tool, it's simple and safe to use. Just download it from here, unzip and run it on a workstation to deploy the files. System administrators could even have this run at startup as part of a startup policy script to push the files after updating the server. Now workstation users can just launch Patron Edge to run the main update and you don't have to walk 15 users through the steps of deploying the additional files.

Create maps of your patrons using free online tools

2008-08-15T19:20:00Z

Check out the guest post I wrote today on The User's Edge blog. I explain how to use the RE Export module and a free service called Map a List to create a Google Maps mashup. These tools are not RE-specific though; you can run Marketing Mailing queries and generate a spreadsheet of address info, enabling you to get a visual of where your season ticket holders or major sponsors live.

What do you think? Do you find it useful to be able to visualize trends about your patrons on a map?

Choose Your Own Order Details

2008-08-13T18:49:00Z

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:

Go to Administration, System Setup, Order Type Definitions and create a new order type
In the Code field, enter a value greater than 100
Enter a description, set Ticket Level Sale to Yes, and choose the appropriate options for the remaining fields. Click OK.
Go to Pricing, Price Types and edit the desired price type
In the Order Type Definition field, select the order type created above
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.

Selling out is a beautiful thing

2008-08-08T22:22:00Z

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.

In Patron Edge Online 3.3.3, we started work on a feature that will allow you to continue to display sold out events on your website rather than having them get removed. This is a great feature in a couple of ways. First, the marketing folks will love it because patrons who visit your site can see how popular your events are and won't wait until last minute to make a purchase. A press release that says your last ballet performance sold out on the first day of sale is a great boost to your reputation. From a customer service perspective, it's also a win because people who visit your website can see that the event they want is already sold out instead of calling the box office to see if it has gone on sale or if there are still tickets available.

The reason this is a PEO Labs post is because the feature requires the help of a DBA to implement so it isn't something that a support analyst will take you through. But with a tech person and 15 minutes of free time and you can get this up and running. Here's how:

Set up Patron Edge

Go to Administration, User Setup, User Groups
Edit the Internet user group and set Update Events Active Data Table to Yes. If you don't see this option, just use the Design toolbar to turn on the field.

Create the SQL job

In Enterprise Manager or SQL Management Studio, create a SQL job to run against the PE database with the following command: exec CalcEventsActiveDataView. This is the part where you want the tech person involved. Set it to run on a schedule as frequent as your PE/PEO sync runs. By default a partial sync runs every hour, but you may want to set this more or less frequently; your mileage may vary on how long a sync takes.

Add the sales point to Patron Edge Online

Go to Administration, System Setup, Sales Points
Create a new entry that uses the number of the Internet sales point. The description can be anything you want; I would set it to the same description as you have in PE for clarity's sake.

Configure Site Settings

Here is where all of the business logic comes in. Your tech person can do the configuration, but the box office manager and marketing manager need to make some business decisions.

Set Display sold out events to 1 (leave at 0 to remove the event from the site altogether when it is sold out).
Set Display sold out shows to 1 (leave at 0 to remove the show altogether when all of its events are sold out).
Set an expression for Sold-out behavior, using one of these examples:

Option	Value	Explanation
<empty string>		Events will never be defined as "Sold Out"
Numeric value	5	Event is Sold Out once number of empty seats = 5
Percentage	10%	Event is Sold Out once percentage of empty seats = 10%
Min(Value, Percentage)	Min(5,10%)	Event is Sold Out once percentage of empty seats = 10% number of empty seats = 5, whichever is lower
Max(Value, Percentage)	Max(5,10%)	Event is Sold Out once percentage of empty seats = 10% number of empty seats = 5, whichever is higher

And with that, I bid you good weekend. Now take this stuff, run with it, and come back to leave comments about how it's working for you.

Save time on the Administration site with Favorites

2008-08-06T15:10:00Z

Sorry for not posting anything last week; I'll give you two great posts this week to make up for it!

Patron Edge Online version 3.3.3 introduced a completely new, redesigned Administration site to organize things better and make running the site easier. One of the best new features is Favorites. You can save all of the site pieces you frequently hit to your Favorites and access them from the Home tab with one click. The best part is that it's very intuitive. Here's how to create your first Favorite:

1. On the Administration site, browse to Content, Events, Shows
2. Now click the blue star icon in the upper left part of the screen
3. When prompted, enter a name for your favorite or just leave the caption as is, and click OK
4. Lather, rinse, and repeat, until you have all your most frequently used items favorited

When you log into the Administration site you start on the Home tab. Now you can just click Favorites and choose the place you want to go, eliminating the distraction of all entries that aren't relevant to your needs. A site administrator would choose items like Site Settings, Start Sync, Esro Logs and Check Connection as Favorites. For a designer or content creator, Favorites might be Shows, Designs for Tickets, and Interfaces.

What Administration features do you use most? Has the Favorites feature helped you save time?

Validate form fields in Patron Edge Online

2008-07-24T14:10:00Z

Patron Edge Online can be a double-edged sword when it comes to data entry. A user has the ability to enter his own address and phone information so that you don't have to try to track it down elsewhere later on, but when you don't enforce any kind of formatting standard, searching or reporting on it in the system can become a pain. Luckily PEO has a built-in feature that allows you to validate form fields using something called a regular expression. If that phrase means nothing to you, don't worry. We have a regular expression builder that will walk you through it. If you are familiar with JavaScript regular expressions, you can write them manually and bypass the builder tool.

Regular expressions are a great way to test for valid phone and email formatting, so be sure to take a few minutes this week and set up a few. To illustrate how to use the builder, here is an example that forces Email to have an @ symbol and at least one period.

Go to Administration, System Setup, User-Fields Rules
Edit the row for Email
Click the regular expression builder button beside Regular Exp 1
From the Begins with drop-down list, select 'any char' that occurs 'once or many'
In the Followed By section, select 'the char', enter the @ symbol, and select occurs 'once'. Then click Add
Change Followed By to 'any char' that occurs 'once or many' and click Add
Change Followed By again to 'the char', enter a period and select occurs 'once'. Click Add again
In the Ends With section, select 'any char' occurs 'once or many'
To test, enter various combinations of values in the Validate field and click Validate. An alert box will tell if the values pass the rule or not.
When finished, click OK.

If you are familiar with creating regular expressions, you can type directly into the Regular Exp 1 field and skip the builder. In the above example, you can type the expression ^.+@.+\..+$ directly into the field. Advanced users note: the regular expression field does not support the Replace or Split methods, only the Test method.

What other regular expressions are you using to keep your data in a nice, clean format? Leave a note in the comments.

Patron Edge 3.310 patch 7 is now available

2008-07-22T12:04:00Z

It's that time again folks. Patch 7 for Patron Edge is now available for download. This patch fixes a couple of critical issues related to posting from Patron Edge to The Financial Edge. If you do not integrate with The Financial Edge, there's no need to download the patch at this time. The following Knowledgebase solution references the fixed item:

BB480350 - GL Pre-Post Report is out of balance

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.

Six tweaks to improve performance

2008-07-18T19:46:00Z

So you've loaded the latest SQL patches and Windows service packs, updated Patron Edge and PEO to the latest version and trimmed down transaction times, but your database just can't keep up with you. Before going out and buying a brand new, top-of-the-line server for your database, try some of these tweaks to get a bump in performance.

Update your compatibility level - If you updated at some point from SQL Server 2000 to version 2005, chances are your database is still running in SQL 2000 compatibility mode. Microsoft claims performance gains by updating to 2005 so make sure that your database is taking advantage of it.

Keep things tidy - Imagine you are making dinner and having a conversation at the same time, and end up putting a corkscrew in the wrong drawer. The next time you need the corkscrew it takes longer than usual to find it, right? So after a while you go and reorganize everything to find things quickly again. Just like you need to reorganize the kitchen cabinets every once in a while to find the things you need, you also need to reorganize your hard disk and your database to make data easier to find. See this article for defragmenting the physical filesystem, and Knowledgebase solution BB120081 for steps on rebuilding the database indexes.

Update statistics - SQL Server keeps statistics about all of your tables and idexes. This includes things like the number of rows in a table and helps SQL determine the best way to build a query and return data. Keeping statistics up-to-date allows queries to run their fastest. Check out Knowledgebase solution BB137060 for a how-to.

Split your database files - Reading and writing from the hard disk is one of the biggest performance bottlenecks of SQL Server. To reduce the time it takes to read and write from a disk, put the database file on one hard disk and the log file on a second disk (on the same machine). See solution BB113761 for steps to do this. If you have three hard disks, put the ‘Tempdb’ database on a third disk for the best performance. It’s not too difficult to do, but you’ll want to consult your system administrator first.

Check out your memory - Another great way to improve performance is to ensure that the server has enough memory. Right-click the taskbar and select Task Manager. On the Performance tab, check the Commit Charge total against the Physical Memory total. If the Commit Charge is regularly jumping higher than the Physical Memory, the machine is attempting to convert hard disk space into memory, which is slow. This is a good case to buy more memory for the server.

Give SQL an edge over other applications - By default, Windows is configured to give running programs priority over background services. We can switch this so that SQL Server and other services have priority over programs run in the foreground. To do this, go to Control Panel, System, Advanced. In the Performance section click Settings and click Advanced in the new window that comes up. Finally, set the Processor Scheduling section to Background Services and click OK.

Are there other tweaks you've found to get more out of your database server? Share your experience in the comments.

Filling in the blanks in reports

2008-07-08T16:06:00Z

Imagine this scenario: You have started using the ZIP Code Analysis report pretty regularly to decide where to spend your advertising dollars, but you know that some people slip through without having the marketing or ZIP Code information entered by a user and your data could be more accurate. In Patron Edge, you can use the Audit Order Details feature to go back in after the fact and update the records that are missing info.

This is an okay tool on a one-off basis, but the real advantage of it is the ability to globally change things. For example, you have a huge line out the door for the July 4th Extravaganza and you need to get people through the line as quickly as possible. You decide to turn off the requirement to capture a marketing source to trim a couple of seconds per sale. At the end of the day, you know that your recent radio spot was the reason everyone came out to visit but you need to get this into the system for reporting. To add in the information, do this:

Go to Administration, Client Management, Audit Order Details
Use the filters to get the date range and sale types you need
Right-click and choose Select All
Click Edit and change the Marketing Source to reflect the spot you aired on WTKT
Now run your marketing reports as needed and you'll have the most accurate information, without having to export to a spreadsheet and then play with the numbers

Have you found any other good uses for the Audit Order Details feature? Share your experiences in the comments.

Five ways to cut transaction time

2008-06-30T19:54:00Z

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:

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
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.
Use shortcut keys
If 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.
Trim payment method options
In 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.
Create a cash-only line
For 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.

Send an SMS blast to patrons using free online tools

2008-06-24T13:51:00Z

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:

Sign up for the Flipout service
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.
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
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
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 3 has been released!

2008-06-17T20:35:00Z

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.

Patron Edge 3.310 patch 6 is now available

2008-06-17T14:36:00Z

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

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!

What do your patrons think about your PEO site?

2008-06-13T20:50:00Z

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.

How can I help?

2008-06-13T14:38:00Z

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!