We are a group of users of Blackbaud products and are not affiliated with Blackbaud. We'd love to have you join our community to help and be helped in getting the most from your Blackbaud software.
Register now to join us to get independant advice on your system, connect with 3rd party consultants to help you maximize your database and have a real alternative to the official Blackbaud website.
Our organization has been integrated between RE & PE since July 07, and we are now interested in upgrading our web potential in terms of ticket sales. Can anyone who has PE Online speak to it? Any major problems or any major assets? We currently process all web orders manually and would love to rely on an automated system.
We use both PE and PEO and have been very impressed with PEO. It is a very solid system that does what it is supposed to do. Our patrons have loved the abillity to choose their own seats and our online sales have gone up significantly because of it. Please let me know if you have any specific questions.
Thanks for the response. I am glad to hear PEO has been working well for your organization. Our main concern is keeping records clean. We went through a pretty messy integration process a bit ago, and part of getting back on track was massive record clean-up sessions. Does your organization have to deal with a large amount of duplicates or incomplete records? There is also concern about receiving "bot" junk records that might clog our system/integration. Do you manually check all records that come in?
We do have a large number of duplicate records because of PEO which we work on cleaning up on a regular basis. The reason for this is that on PEO you have a choice of either locking down the system so that if it recognizes their name it won't let them create a new account (they have to remember their password or use the "forgot password" function) or you can make it so they can create a new account whenever they'd like. We went with the second option simply because we wanted to make it as easy as possible for someone to order a ticket. We didn't want them getting frustrated when they couldn't remember their information and then not coming back to the site.
We do have a large number of duplicate records because of PEO which we work on cleaning up on a regular basis. The reason for this is that on PEO you have a choice of either locking down the system so that if it recognizes their name it won't let them create a new account (they have to remember their password or use the "forgot password" function) or you can make it so they can create a new account whenever they'd like. We went with the second option simply because we wanted to make it as easy as possible for someone to order a ticket. We didn't want them getting frustrated when they couldn't remember their information and then not coming back to the site.
Our Box Office is integrated with Raiser's Edge, and we do use PEO. For the most part, it runs smoothly. We have encountered some problems that you may be interested in, however. First, and especially if you allow creation of duplicate records by online users, you do have to deal with a large number of duplicates that need to be cleaned. Second, it could be helpful to turn off the integration of certain items between PE and PEO, for example, we were integrating state names, which resulted in a list of states for users to choose from that included things such as N,y. etc. We had to turn off the integration of states so that we could clean up the state list in PEO. Third, there may be an issue of where the email addresses entered online by new users map in PE. There are supposed to map to the "Email" field in the client's CRM record, but occasionally, they map to a phone field. This happened to a number of people recently, and they were unable to access their account as a result. Lastly, and this is more an issue of convenience, when you choose shows to drop into different categories, the drop down list will hold ALL of the shows in PE, active and inactive, So managing these drop-down menus can become cumbersome.
I notice that you posted on 2/6, have you already started with PEO? If so, how is it working out for you thus far?
Patron's Edge Online 
Linear Mode
