Sometimes it happens: you unexpectedly need to cancel or reschedule a performance for which tickets have been issued. Audience1st can help ease the pain of notifying and reaccommodating your patrons.

There are two possible scenarios:

1. You want to reschedule an existing performance, but keep all or most reservations the same. That is, mostly the same patrons will come to that performance, just on a different date. In this case, read this article.
2. You want to cancel a performance, reaccommodating patrons to various other existing performances or possibly to a new performance yet to be added. This article tells you how to do it.

The basic steps are:

1. Immediately halt any further sales/reservations for the canceled performance
2. (Optional) If desired, arrange for single-ticket holders (non-subscribers) to be able to reaccommodate themselves. (Subscribers can generally do this already, unless you’ve taken specific steps in Season Setup to prevent it.)
3. Notify patrons.

Stop Sales for the Affected Performance

This article explains how to immediately stop all sales and reservations for a performance.

Do this step for each canceled performance.

Arrange for Single-Ticket Holders to Reaccommodate Themselves

When you first set up your single-ticket revenue vouchers, you may have left unchecked the option for “Self-changes allowed.” In such cases, canceling, refunding, or changing a single-ticket holder’s ticket requires box office intervention.

You may prefer to handle it the same way for reaccommodating single-ticket holders when a performance is canceled. But you also have the option of allowing them to reaccommodate themselves without box office intervention, by following these steps:

1. Go to the Vouchers tab and filter to show only Regular Revenue Vouchers. Select a voucher type that has redemptions for the canceled performance and click on its name to edit it.
2. Check the box “Self-changes allowed” and save changes.
3. Make a note to yourself that after the dust settles from the canceled performance, you should restore the previous value of this checkbox if needed (see below).

While enabling self-changes on regular revenue vouchers temporarily can ease the burden on theater staff by allowing single-ticket holders affected by the performance cancellation to reschedule themselves without help from the box office, there are some significant side-effects that should be considered before choosing this approach.

Allowing self-change on a regular revenue voucher will also give the single-ticket holder the ability to refund their own purchases of these vouchers. Also, this change affects all vouchers of this type and not necessarily just the ones purchased for the canceled performance. These are impacts which most theaters normally don’t want; but presumably canceling a performance is a special case.

Notify Patrons

If you have Mailchimp connected to Audience1st, you can use the Reports tab to quickly send an email to notify all ticket holders and subscribers affected by the canceled performance. This automated method will cover all affected patrons except for those who do not have a valid email address in Audience1st. In practice, this should be everyone except patrons that were hand-entered without an email address by box office staff.

The idea is to identify all affected patrons, export that list to Mailchimp, and compose and send an email there. This article explains how to do it.

Other Patrons

You’ll probably still have to handle some patrons’ change requests manually, but hopefully the steps above will let you reach most of the affected patrons rapidly and let them choose their own dates.