Herein is a survey of the existing Website, CRM, and Ticketing implementation for the Bay Area Children’s Theatre, along with a technical plan for replacing and enhancing said implementation.
Several activities were engaged in to accomplish this:
The elements of the implementation project are:
OpenTickets is a WordPress plugin that utilizes the leading WordPress eCommerce solution, WooCommerce for doing event ticketing. OpenTickets and CiviCRM are complementary, as OpenTickets does not attempt any CRM functionality, and eCommerce can be a stretch for CiviCRM.
OpenTickets is open source. They make their core plugin completely free and the code is posted to GitHub for other developers to build on. However, most implementations will likely utilize their restricted licence add-ons. Because of the technology, even these licensed extensions have accessible source code and can therefore be modified and extended.
The key features that BACT needs and that are provided by OpenTickets are:
More information on the features of OpenTickets is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ioL9-yvusaiLckey3MAHuGANgx8YyS_FjL1hWhWAnv0
Estimate Components
We have validated that your CiviCRM instance was not extended in ways detrimental to a clean upgrade path.
However, five major version upgrades are required, and so we will practice extra care in validating the upgrade and set a budget for potentially unforeseen issues.
The CiviBoxOffice extension is a non-trivial extension and will take some attention to cleanly remove.
Finally, we concur with the proposal to re-model student and parent-child data in the CRM, though not necessarily coupled with the upgrade. The data transformation will be best approached after upgrading and doing other clean-ups, which could reveal other data clean-ups and transformations necessary.
Being a featureful component, the configuration of OpenTickets will be a substantial undertaking.
The degree of involvement by Ginkgo Street Labs is optional, and OpenTickets themselves can also provide support for the implementation. We are providing an estimate assuming maximum facilitation which includes requirements gathering, integration, configuration, documentation, and training. The goal will be to get a system tailored to BACT’s needs and enough staff training to carry the system forward. We anticipate that BACT will want to use all of the extensions for OpenTickets available with the Enterprise License.
OpenTickets, in tandem with WooCommerce and WordPress, will be capturing important data for the CRM.
We will create a custom extension that will watch for changes and synchronize data for use in CiviCRM. The data can then be used for marketing and communications, reporting, fundraising and development, and any number of other functions CiviCRM is capable of.
Events will be modelled in CiviCRM in much the same way as they are now. The big difference being that they are created and managed in OpenTickets. The custom code will be triggered by events created in OpenTickets, and propagate to Events created automatically in CiviCRM. The chief usage of Events in CiviCRM will be for working with participant records and reporting on Events in general.
OpenTickets and WooCommerce together, provide an online shopping cart box-office experience out of the box. Users may browse shows, add performances to a cart, and continue browsing for additional tickets. Additional merchandise may be added on as well, such as merchandise, etc.
In tandem with the propagation of data from OpenTickets to CiviCRM in the custom CiviCRM Extension, Data will be utilized from CiviCRM to customize the checkout process for BACT’s programs. These will be packaged into a WordPress plugin but may also work with a CiviCRM custom extension to expose new programming interfaces (APIs).
Many of our customers have considered using other email platforms because of the attractive and powerful email composition tools. With the integration of the Mosaico extension for CiviCRM, we believe that CiviCRM is again an equal contender, and because it houses the data and has powerful list management tools, deserves another look for all of your email use cases.
We can create, or train and support you in creating, the needed templates for your bulk or blast emails using Mosaico.
Avoiding today’s spam filters requires some care. It is however quite doable with a combination of following best practices for list hygene and system administration. We can assure the reputation of your email with the following measures:
In addition, we will facilitate specification and validation of all automated and transactional emails generated by both CiviCRM or WooCommerce. CiviCRM’s scheduled reminders features will be used to automate emails relative to a given date, such as a week or a day before a field trip or performance.
As part of the implementation of the new website CMS (Wordpress), we will ensure that users can manage their own email and contact preferences with a login to the site.
Student Matinees are a special case of shows and are largely supported out of the box by Open Tickets.
We will customize the check-out experience with custom fields to be stored in CiviCRM, and ensure the CiviCRM integration appropriately models the Student Matinee Program.
Pre/Post-Workshop will be purchased as add-ons and also integrated into CiviCRM to keep custom data and manage follow-up to the request.
School tours are another well supported use-case by OpenTickets, requiring custom data collection in the check-out process. Payment need not be collected at time of request. We will revisit the specification of the custom data requirements with you.
Classes and camps can be sold and tracked much like shows. Using OpenTickets to sell classes and Camps will enable using a calendar for the purchase experience as well as a common schedule management interface. BACT would like to sell individual-day passes, as well as full camp/course passes. We will have to flush-out the details of the implementation but WooCommerce supports multiple options for bulk and dynamic pricing. We are confident that we can have a solution that enables selling “bulk” tickets as well as individual tickets such that available seats can be tracked using WooCommerce’s inventory functionality.
As with shows, classes and camps will be integrated into CiviCRM as events. We will track registrations with events for each day. We will devise a method to link related events in a course or camp for management and reporting purposes.
Teachers will be given special access to CiviCRM through CiviCRM’s access control features that will enable pulling class rosters or updating Student contact records. Custom reports will be created to replace the current drupal views.
We would like to recommend a refresher assessment and consulting on BACT’s usage of CiviCRM for fundraising operations. At the very least, we need to assure that the new data modelling not only meets program requirements, but can be utilized to the fullest for development operations.
It will be a significant upgrade to the latest version of CiviCRM, so some re-orientation might be called for as well.
All of the desired functionality in the internal survey you provided us, are quite feasible with the latest version of CiviCRM. We do not recommend attempting all of these goals until after the OpenTickets integration project is complete, but it would be beneficial to plan for and flesh out requirements during the OpenTickets phase.
The selection of the Wordpress Content Management System was an obvious choice for several reasons:
The degree of involvement of Ginkgo Street in the Content Management System can largely be at BACT’s choice. At minimum, we recommend that Ginkgo Street provide: