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:
- 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. This article tells you how to do it.
- You want to cancel a performance, reaccommodating patrons to various other existing performances or possibly to a new performance yet to be added. In that case, read this article.
The basic steps to reschedule a performance are:
- (Optional) Immediately halt any further sales or reservations for the to-be rescheduled performance.
- Notify patrons.
- Reschedule the performance.
Halt Further Sales and Reservations
You may want to stop ticket sales and reservations for the performance you are about to reschedule in order to avoid a patron making a purchase while you are in the process of rescheduling. Stopping sales will avoid unnecessary confusion if a patron comes along at just the wrong time, but it is optional. This article explains how to immediately stop all sales and reservations for a performance.
If you do stop sales and reservations for the performance, remember to restart sales and reservations again after the rescheduling operation is complete.
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 rescheduled 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.
Reschedule the Performance
In the Season tab, click on the show name, and then the performance date. A screen for editing performance details will come up. Change the date of the performance on that screen, and Save Changes.
Next–and this could be important–you will need to look through the redemptions associated with that performance and possibly adjust the start/end sales dates of each ticket type. (This isn’t necessary for patrons who already have tickets for this performance, but it may be necessary if you want to allow additional patrons to purchase tickets for the new rescheduled date.) On the show’s main screen under the Season tab, click the down arrow to the left of the rescheduled performance. A list of redemptions will appear, showing the start and end sales dates for each ticket type valid for that performance. You will need to edit these one at a time. A pro tip is to Shift-click or Control-click (on Mac computers, Command-click), which opens each redemption’s details in a new browser window or tab while keeping the original window or tab open so you can quickly go on to the next redemption.
If the Performance Already Started
If you need to reschedule a performance after it has already started–perhaps a power failure occurred halfway through the first act–you can follow the steps listed above in order to move the performance to a new date and time and keep all reservations and ticket sales intact.
However, you will also need to use the Front of House tab to change the status of all patrons on the door list to not yet checked in. To do this, click the Front of House tab, select the performance, click the Reservations button, and then click the red X for each entry on the door list. This will allow you to check in patrons as they arrive for the rescheduled performance.
Note that walkup sales are tricky. From the reservations page or walkup sales report you can see how many walkup sales there were. However, these sales are anonymous so the system does not have any identifying information about the patrons who purchased tickets as walkups. Because Audience1st does not store credit card information, patrons showing credit cards used for the original purchase will not help. You may need to take the patrons’ word on who paid for a ticket as a walkup at the original performance.