Hi Craig, I'd be interested to hear your feedback about how the membership scanning process is working for you. Is PE integrated with RE at all? Have you looked at any vendors yet for plastic cards? Thanks, Liz Elizabeth Grover [Email Removed]

Hi Craig After having spent 5+ years with VISTA as our POS software and RE as our membership database, we decided to bite the bullet and purchase PE and PEO. I see the potential in PE and do not discount PE's capabilities but believe that it still needs a lot more development. This product does have much to offer but it definitely needs a few more years of design and corrections in order to really be a great product. It still caters too much to theatre and opera needs and not as much for museums, ie. more flexibility, less focus on Series and Allocations. We purchased PE in approx July 06 and went live Sept 30th coinciding with our grand reopening (the museum having been closed for 1.5 years for a major reconstruction) We wanted the whole works, the integration being one of the key selling points to the product. Here are the issues that I now face: - RE/PE integration. its up and running and overall, so far so good. It was painful at the start and for anyone looking to start this it is VERY important that you understand the issue of duplicate records. That said its hard working between the two because PE does not offer the full features that RE does. For special memberships, discounted and such I have to send all that work upstairs to the RE data entry person since PE cannot handle it. I really want to implement bar code scanning but am very hesitant because it so far doesn’t really seem to offer much in relation to streamlining the admission process. In my imagined scenario a member can present their RE bar coded card, have it scanned, and automatically add tickets to the database. Unfortunately this is a very rigid process and does not allow for various ticket combinations and such. I have yet to fully explore this but these are my reservations so far. Then also because of the dupes issue our RE/PE/PEO integration is compromised. More often than not members attempting to log in to their accounts are not recognized because the system has way too many dupes. This can be attributed to the messy database we had prior to integration but moving forward its really hard to keep a handle on things overall, esp with PE's lack of dupe recognition. - PE reports. I have now for the past four months had to reconcile each month’s collections day by day by hand because the PE Closed Drawer Report is not accurately recording data. I have brought this to their attention and they promise a fix. I also discovered an issue in the Sales Profile report, and same response, they are working on a fix. So far this is only two reports and I hope this was just a bug from an upgrade back in the early winter and that this can be fixed quickly. PE canned reports are not that easy because you do need to still work with 2-3+ reports to get the data you need. - PEO. We had Blackbaud design some customizations for us but with the latest upgrade these are now standard features. I have yet to dig my hands into the newest system since the upgrade, so I can’t speak on this topic too much. The confusing User Guide mentions features that cannot be made use of (membership promo codes) unless you can purchase an additional module. Same goes for Series sales. - PE Reservations. I don’t know if anyone makes use of this but I have my hands tied and can only wait until Blackbaud fixes this issue. I’d love to be able to “reserve” tickets for a patron and give them a grace time of 10 days to mail in their check. Problem is the calculations in PE releases the tickets the next day and not 10 days later like it is supposed to. I had hoped to open this reserve feature up online so that I can create a “wait list” of sorts, but I have to wait until this design issue is fixed. Akane Henriquez VISTA & PE Systems Manager Visitor Services Dept Chicago History Museum (Chicago Historical Society) [i]--- Edited at 2/6/2008 11:55:25 AM by Akane Henriquez[/i]

Hi all, Just a quick reply to Liz's question. We haven't actually moved forward with membership card scanning as yet, because everyone still gets a paper ticket for our ongoing special exhibit, which will be running for a few more months yet. Because I have other tasks that are higher-up in the priority list, I've not delved further into that aspect of PE yet. From what I've read of the docs, though, I don't expect it to be *too* difficult, though (famous last words, eh?) Regarding membership cards: that's become a bit of a fiasco here. We're currently printing cards out from Raiser's Edge onto 8.5 x 11 sheets of pre-perforated 6-up cardstock. We use the default RE 12-field membership card printing option. Because the barcode is so small on that option (and can't be increased in size), and because we're printing onto cardstock, the barcode can't be read reliably. We've looked at the following options for our cards: * dumping data out of RE and printing via a Word mail merge onto the cards we use currently, which would allow us to increase the size of the barcode; * outsourcing the creation of the cards to an external vendor (problematic due to extended turn-around times); * using 8.5 x 11 sheets with a pre-affixed polyester card, which would allow us to print a welcome letter and the membership card as part of a single mail merge; * using a dedicated plastic card printer to print credit-card-like, durable plastic cards (we looked specifically at Alpha Card's Magicard Rio and Tango printers.) We've circled around this for, literally, months now, debating costs, the ability to recycle the cards (a big issue for our executive director, as he's trying to position us as a leader in "green" operations), durability, etc. Where it stands at the moment is that we've "decided not to decide". My preference would probably be first for an Alpha Card system, then for the 8.5 x 11 with attached polyester card; those strike me as being the best-looking, most durable options. But, not my call to make, and those whose it is have not yet made up their minds. Regarding the various posts here that express disappointment regarding PE, I guess all that I can add at this point is "I hear ya". My latest letdown was that our marketing director wanted to know the following information regarding ticket sales for a specific date range: event, sale date, event date, number of tickets sold in the transaction, and the buyer's zip code. I couldn't get him that info, at least not in a format that's usable to him. While a few separate reports come close, none provide the integrated information that he would like to see. Trying to run a custom query, I was just shooting in the dark because the relationships between the tables and fields don't seem to be very fully documented. In addition, while trying a few test queries in an attempt to get this info, I hung up our PE server to the point that our Admissions staff couldn't complete sales. :-( So, there's yet something else that I would have to do after-hours, if I could do it at all. Regards, Craig

Rhonda, we found the work around for the exchanging of sub tickets.  Select the tickets you want to exchange and then RIGHT click, the drop down menu will have exchange and you can exchange 2 at a time!