Hi all,
We recently held our Gala and we tracked everything through an elevated event but we think there are ways we can still streamline. I have a couple of questions about your process:
How do you track invite lists? We used constituencies this year but I'm thinking that attributes would be a better way to go.
Guests list for tables. With the event report, the table guests show up with the sort name of the table. Is there any way to ensure their sort names appear in the event report when it's pulled or is that something that has to be manually updated in excel?
What do you use for your reporting? We used the event listing report but the way it pulls is strange. Even when you sort by table number or event level, it's still mixed up. It doesn't seem to pull clean unless I open in excel and sort manually. Any tips on this?
Also, if you could share any other elevated event best practices that you've discovered, that would be incredibly helpful.
Thanks!Lesley
Lesley-
At UMS, we actually do everything in Elevated Events for an auction, a gala, and special pre-show dinners - even down to the guest names, nametags, food choices and sometimes tables. All of that can be entered into Tessitura out of the box - but we have one custom report that pulls the data as we want to see it - and can also convert into "mergeable" nametag data.
Staying in elevated events also helps you track status of Invited or Attending or Not Attending, which we've found very useful. The only catch is if you are processing a contribution to that elevated event campaign, but the person is NOT attending (just giving a gift), the software automatically assumes they are attending, and you can't change that status while processing the contribution. But you CAN change it later - or as we do it here at UMS - someone actually updates or enters the elevated event info in advance via the History/Events tab in the constituent record.
Hope that makes sense - I'm happy to share the report or more info if that helps...
Beth