Is anyone tracking potential event hosts in Tessitura? I am looking for a way to track donors who have, or are willing to, host an event in their home. We would need to know the general geographic area of the home, the city, how many people they could host and some miscellaneous notes (ie: they have a piano, great garden, etc…). My current thinking is to use the Activities radio button with a special activity type and statuses, the performance as the geographic area and the number of attendees as how many they can host and the notes field for miscellaneous information. We have a custom Activities Report that would give me the city. Is anyone doing this? Or something else to track this information?
ThanksJess Levy
San Francisco Opera
415-565-3283
Hi Jess,
I don't know about the specific process we go through for similar hosting activities but, as for recording the area, do you not use the geo_area field in T_ADDRESS? The values are based on those entered in TR_GEO_AREA in system tables and I have a script that runs nightly based on state and/or post code ranges for new or amended records.
While there is no data entry box at the front end to enter the geo_area, I've created a List Criteria Element so users can create lists accordingly.
Geo_area is also available in T-Stats as an attribute.
Cheers,
Kevin
We are not doing this but are also thinking about ways to track this and there are three ways that seem logical to me (#3 is the one I lean towards) depending on how much detail you want to be able to track and how you want to view it and export it from the database if needed:
1. Tracking in activities like you stated. My concern with this is having to enter a date which doesn't seem terribly relevant if you are just trying to record interesting and things like who has a piano or other.
2. Track with an attribute where the attribute could be something like "Possible Event Host" and there could be drop down options for the different types of host you are looking for, ex: piano recital, speaking engagement, garden party, etc. The issues I can think of with this is it doesn't allow you to make any notes about time of year preferences, if they have been asked in the past and have accepted or declined, or any other pertinent notes.
3. Track with plans - create a dummy campaign for event hosts, then you could add in all kinds of additional information and you could set-up the campaign dates so that it is active over a long period of time or just for a season depending on how you wanted to utilize/manage it. I'm always an advocate of more info over less so for me plans allows all kinds of additional data to be tracked. Also with this option you could build in all kinds of cool fields in the plans custom tab. And, you could get it all out with reports.
This does sound like a great custom tab!
Attributes would work well for this, though, and would take little time to set up. I’d make them very general. Create a few keywords starting with the same word, for ease of finding them later: something like “Host Capacity-dinner” and Host Capacity-cocktails” that would accept numeric values; “Host Assets” that would allow multiple values such as “Piano-upright” or “Piano-baby grand.” One of these attributes should be “Host-see note” and then you add a Notes type of Host in which you can flesh out details such as “Wants to do one spring event per year; has gorgeous garden and open bar. Piano (antique Steinway) will need tuning but is playable.”
The advantage of attributes is that you can do a quick search on the General tab for people who can host cocktail parties for 100.
If you decide to go that route, I have a custom report that we use to track our Press attributes (how we manage our press lists) that could probably be adapted to provide you the Host information you want in one Excel spreadsheet.
Lucie
______________________________Lucie Spieler