When the last scares have been scared and you’re ready to close up for the season, do these three things first.
1. Relive your best and worst
One of the most important things you can do to set yourself up for success next season is to debrief and evaluate THIS season. Start by writing down a summary of your best day. What went well? WHY did it go well?
Was it your busiest night? Was your whole team on top of their game? Did you have fewer fires to put out? Were your COVID-19 adaptations successful? Understanding why you had a good day can help you have more of those.
Next, reflect on your worst day. Which things went wrong? How were they handled?
Was it bad because it was slow? Maybe it’s time to reevaluate your advertising plan. Were technical difficulties the cause of your stress? Maybe some of the props were too ambitious or need more time for testing. Maybe the WiFi needs upgrading. Would a different layout have helped manage chaotic crowds?
It can be tough to summon the motivation to do this immediately after the season ends. We’re all tired, and we mostly just want to put the bad days behind us. Doing it while your memory is fresh, however, will help you clearly evaluate what improvements you can make next year. And you’ll save yourself from repeating the same headaches.
Want to get a jump start on next season? Schedule a demo to see how HauntPay can help you reach more fans and sell more tickets.
2. Look at the numbers
In addition to evaluating your creative and logistical opportunities for improvement, you should analyze how you did financially. This is what keeps you in business, after all.
Doing a full budgetary review may take some time, but there are a few key things you should address immediately:
- Review your bank statements for any unauthorized transactions that you might have overlooked during the chaos of Haunt Season. If you report them to your financial institution now, you’ll be more likely to recover any lost funds than if you wait longer.
- Look for any disputed transactions from your customers that you need to address. If you’re already a HauntPay client, then you can relax! We automatically handle these disputes for you and provide all the necessary documentation to the financial institutions involved.
- Look at the big picture numbers. How did your sales this year look compared with last year? Did your expenses go up? Did you meet your budgetary goals? Again, you’ll likely need more than one day to do a complete financial review, but taking a look at the big picture now can give you a rough sense for how well you did this season.
Tired of dealing with disputed transactions? Schedule an onboarding call with HauntPay and let our team handle them for you.
3. Thank your team (and your customers!)
Whether they’re paid employees or volunteers, happy team members create happy customers. Hopefully you’ve already been following our tips on ways to keep your volunteers happy during Haunt Season. Don’t miss the opportunity right after your season ends to acknowledge the people who help you create the twisted dark fantasies you’ve dreamed up.
Appreciation helps retain top talent. Send your team off with a thank you and they’ll feel motivated to return next season.
Equally important is a thank you to your customers, the folks who paid to visit your haunt. A simple email blast and social media post will do the trick. Consider including a few photo highlights from your season, interesting facts or scare stats, or even feedback you received (e.g. “we heard from several of you that the new pirate’s dungeon was your favorite scene and we already have plans to expand this next year”).
You can access a list of your customers’ email addresses by logging onto your HauntPay account, clicking on the admin dashboard, and then running a tickets report. Download that list to a CSV file anytime you like.
HauntPay also integrates with more than 2,000 web apps through our partners at Zapier, so you can create automations on email platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Happy Haunting!
Get a jump on next season. Schedule an onboarding call with our team and we’ll get everything set up for you.