Hi there,
We are at the beginning stages of configuring Tessitura and are weighing the option of tracking committees using records (committee record and affiliating committee members to that record) or doing a customization. I'm reaching out to see if anyone out there has any thoughts on pros/cons one way or another and also, if anyone has any customizations they have done to share.
Thanks so much!
We track internal organizational committees by constituency. We track outside committees like community/municipal or others via affiliations.
Marie
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Marie Kocher | Development Assistant
Kansas City Ballet
Todd Bolender Center for Dance and Creativity
500 W Pershing Road
Kansas City, MO 64108
816-931-2232 x 1382 | 816-931-1172 (fax)
mkocher@kcballet.org
Buy tickets and enroll for classes: www.kcballet.org
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Susie Terada Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:36 PM To: Marie Kocher Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Committee tracking customizations
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Hi Susie -
Welcome to the community! As you'll find in Tessitura, there's always a couple of ways of doing something and deciding which way to go is often a matter of how you want to see and use things in your business.
We track committee membership by relationship to an internal account - and there are pros and cons to that. The pros, for us, are - ease of seeing who is on a committee simply by going to the committee account, being able to easily see all the committees one person is on (or has been on) in one place in Tessitura, the ability to use start/end dates to indicate time on a committee, being able to do multiple affiliations to a committee as people rotate on and off again, having a note area where we can jot down memorable things about that person's time on the committee, being able to note a title (president, secretary, etc), and the fact that we *didn't* have to customize.
The downsides - upkeep can be time consuming, especially if you have a *lot* of committees. Keeping the records clean and up to date does take a lot conscious effort and dedicated time of staff. It can result in a lot of clutter on the relationships tab - we tried to mitigate that a little by creating a new Relationship Category of 'Board Internal' which at least groups them all together and makes it easier to sort out when you are glancing at the screen. Did I mention upkeep? :D
Good luck in your set up!
HTH,
Heather
We associate our Board of Directors account to our Company account. Members of the board are affiliated to the Board of Directors account with start and end dates and titles to indicate their board position (if they have one). We use a special type of affiliation—FGO BOD Member—to make the relationship really, really clear. We inactivate relationships when they end.
Any accounts whose giving should be considered when assessing a board member’s financial contributions are affiliated or associated to the board member via an “FGO BOD Credit” affiliation or an “FGO BOD Credit Donor/FGO BOD Credit Recipient” association.
Having an active FGO BOD Member affiliation to our Board of Directors account creates a constituency of BOD. We track meeting attendance via the Activities screen. The BOD Credit accounts get a constituency of “bod.”
The only real customizations here are the scheduled job that updates constituencies based on active relationships and a custom report that pulls in four years of donor history, meeting attendance records, event attendance, two years of ticket history and in-kind giving, and a specific note type.
I like using standard Tessitura elements, wherever possible, to track standard behaviors. There’s a lot of flexibility, and upgrading the system and merging duplicate records are both easier.
Lucie
______________________________Lucie SpielerIT Development and Training ManagerFLORIDA GRAND opera
Hello Susie,
I echo Heather. We have the same approach. Board membership is tracked through a membership and constituency combo, and the committee involvement through relationships (though for internal purposes we have moved everything, literally all relationship types, to one category, which has it's own pros and cons). The record name is the name of the committee, e.g. SCFTA Board Finance Committee, and then each member's individual record is affiliated to their respective committees. The record type of the committees is "SCFTA", so that they don't pull into our daily reports and are easy to isolate and suppress from our consortium members.
One member of our development team is responsible for all board data management in Tessitura. That person will usually update all of the committees when they are approved at the start of the year, and just makes adjustments throughout the year as members join and resign from the board. Occasionally, an intern will assist with the data entry.
Good luck with whatever direction you choose!Amber
_______________________________________________________
Amber Newsome
Manager of Special CampaignsSegerstrom Center for the Arts
600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626
T (714) 556-2122 x 4259 F (714) 755-2712E ANewsome@SCFTA.org