[Organizers] Re: Tracking/Tracing Venmo Payments?

Using a POS (point of sale) solution like Square will help with tracking the extra information. It's more work to set up but does come with some advantages. * It will track additional info for each sale, including what the event was. You can also sell-non event things such as swag, and it will keep track of what payment went to which item. * It integrates well with gift cards, coupons, and loyalty programs, which are all features that a more complex contra dance club may want to provide. * It helps with training volunteer cashiers. You have to configure it, but a POS will walk the cashier through the process through a sequence of screens with questions they should ask and buttons for indicating what the customer (the dancer) has said. I tried in the past and can see why so many people stick with P2P (peer to peer) apps for a contra dance. With an app like Venmo, Paypal, or Cash App, the cashier doesn't have to use a device at all while making a sale. They can show the dancer a QR code for where to send the payment, and then the dancer does the work. This is especially valuable for sliding scale arrangements where the dancer chooses how much to pay, because they can just pay that amount discreetly, rather than discuss out loud what they are going to pay. To get going with a POS software, I think it's probably good to obtain 1-2 cheap, used tablets and put them in your cash box as the official POS devices for the club. That way, a cashier can accept Square (etc) payments without having to do some IT work ahead of time to set their phone up. Also, if you set a POS up in advance, you can set up some hand-holding like I mentioned in that last bullet point. One thing I ran into when trying to implement Square for the Atlanta Contra Dancers was that Square starts charging subscription fees when you start having multiple users of the app for a single organization. The common workaround to this is to share one account, even though it loses some information. In general, I think if you want to get more serious about marketing, you end up wanting to use something more sophisticated than a basic P2P app. You'll pay in complexity, though. Lex