Hi All,
We are getting ready to do some name captures (with contact information) and are trying to decide if it's better to apply a Constituency to them or an Attribute. Any advice? We most likely will be using list manager to pull the info but want to make sure we know all the pros/cons before we decide. Here is what we have:
Constituencies:
Pros:
Con
Attributes:
Cons
What kind of info are you trying to capture here?
We've found Constitiuencies to be useful for labelling cohorts, audience segments, membership/donor status, etc.
We don't use Attributes much right now, but have used them in the past to tag program interest and subset info on their constituency (where that dropdown comes in handy).
A lot of it comes down to what information you want to collect and what you want to do with it after.
Constituences are built to have start/end dates while attributes are fixed, so that always guides my thinking towards which one to use. Capturing relational data makes sense within constituencies, such as being a board member or subscriber, since those have a natural timeframe attached to them...whereas a fixed or perpetual piece of info (such as a birthdate) is better suited to attributes. Hope that helps guide your thinking!
It's also certainly possible to display an attribute value in the constituent header - the Flex Header topics in the documentation go into detail. It takes a bit of time but isn't too arduous to set up though.
I concur with some of the others above: Constituencies are more of a label, a flag to get our attention about something, not really a place to store data. Attributes are better suited to that.
Re: no end dates. It is certainly possible to create a date-type attribute and to use that as an end date for something. We have had several of these over the years.
Are you wanting to store the origin, category, create date, or something like that, of these name-captured constituents? I'd suggest creating them with a unique original source (i.e. row in TR_ORIGINAL_SOURCE). We've used that in the past for large imports, which makes them very easy to find them later.
Personally, I would tend to use attribute. For me, Constituencies are more of a “OMG, we *NEED* to know this info about someone every time we pull them up”.
Attributes in my case are more like ‘yeah, whatever, good that we know this, but I don’t have to see it every. single. time. I pull up your account’
(that’s a little flippant, but I think is a pretty clear explanation J)
Cheers,
Kathleen
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Grant Offermann Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2017 5:05 PM To: Kathleen Smith Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Constituencies vs Attributes
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Another consideration is Ticketing and Price Rules – Constituencies offer a little more flexibility without running list and special procedures
From: Kathleen Smith [mailto:bounce-kathleensmith6726@tessituranetwork.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2017 5:39 PM To: McKinley, Leslie <LMcKinley@nycitycenter.org> Subject: RE: [Tessitura Development Forum] Constituencies vs Attributes
Cons:
Hi All, We are getting ready to do some name captures (with contact information) and are trying to decide if it's better to apply a Constituency to them or an Attribute. Any advice? We most likely will be using list manager to pull the info but want to make sure we know all the pros/cons before we decide. Here is what we have: Constituencies: Pros: Can have it show up on constituent header They have start and end dates Can be controlled with different security objects (Add, change, view) Just create it in TR_Constituency Con Lack of detail, no dropdown. Their either have it or they don’t. Attributes: Pros: Can add a subset to the attribute. Eg: Dropdown to choose from. Can be used with control group Cons A little more work creating them since you have to use multiple tables No end date This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Development Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Development forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!
This is a great discussion!
The one thing I hate about both attributes and constituencies is that they can be deleted by users and the audit trail disappears with them. Has anyone found a custom way to add a full audit of these fields to the audit button under the transactions tab?
The upside of constituencies is that you can give it an end date to retain the history. An attribute the only option if it no longer applies is to delete it.
Chuck / New York Philharmonic
Hi all,
Just wanted to clarify/point something out here as I'm not 100% sure if it's known - you can use either Constituencies or Attributes (or Lists or Exclusion Lists or Appeal/Source or Ranking) in Pricing Rules.
B
Wow! What a great response. Thanks everyone.
And Pricing Rules can be used with both Constituences and Attributes.
Re: deleting constituencies, we've gotten around some of the mystery of that by removing all but view rights for constituencies from all users (we create/inactivate all 50+ of ours via SQL updates), but I agree that constituencies and attributes should be audited.