Hi @sarah.s! We don’t do festival style events often so I’m sure your needs are complicated than ours have been, but happy to help brainstorm some ideas.
One option would be to create one or more “festival holds” patrons and sell group ticket to them. So there could be a “house use festival holds” patron with a group ticket worth 60 admissions and a separate “corporate sponsor festival holds” patron with a group ticket worth 40 admissions. They will show up in the event’s Attendance tab so you can see the purpose and quantity easily and it will control the available admissions left on the event for the public. You would still need to go in and edit the admissions on the group tickets as things were sold to real patrons, so may not meet your needs that way. It will also make the Sales tab look as if all “holds” are real.
Hm, maybe you could sell individual (versus group) tickets to a single “festival holds” patrons but make sure to use correctly named comp promotions. So the patron might have 60 tickets sold with a comp-house promotion as well as 40 tickets sold with a comp-sponsor promotion. When it’s time to hand these tickets off to real patrons, you can either gift them to the real patron or, if they’re booked on individual orders, transfer the entire order to the real patron. This option will let you use the Attendance tab to see how many of a “hold type” are still held versus in use. Like the above idea, this will makes the Sales tab appear as if all “held” admissions are truly booked.
Uh, let’s see, what else can we brainstorm? You could setup a dedicated performance within the event for each major “hold type”, setting the Quantity to Sell/Report amounts accordingly and making only the public performance available online. I suspect managing total capacity this way is challenging, though it means you are only selling when you are in fact ready to sell to a real patron so the Sales tab will be accurate and you can reference the Performance tab for remaining available by “hold type”. To change amounts, you will still need to manually adjust the public performance and “hold type” performance’s Quantity to Sell/Report.
Perhaps the simplest option is to use the event’s Marketing tab to manually record how many of each “hold type” there should be and align each type with a sales promotion for the box office to easily compare sales versus allotted quantities. If total capacity is a concern, then you may still need to manually adjust the performance’s Quantity to Sell/Report, but the benefit of the Internal Marketing Notes is their visibility within an order for internal box office reference.
Not sure if any of this is better than your spreadsheet, but hopefully some wacky ideas here that can help move the brainstorming process along on your end!
