Hi everybody,
We're working on configuring Tessitura Plans to track our moves management (goodbye Excel!)
The more we discuss internally, the more we realise our goals are not tied to our specific Tessitura Campaign/Fund structure as currently configured.
Because the goal is multi-year gifts with moneys across different Tessitura Campaigns/Funds (Memberships, Major Gifts, etc) all towards a specific recognition programme, we are considering creating a new "dummy" Tessitura Campaign (say, "Donor Recognition") with no fiscal year, no active Fund, and no active Designation. It would just be to house the Plan.
Is there any downside to this that we haven't considered? We realize all the contributions will need to be manually tagged with the Plan, but given the volume that seems manageable workload.
Thanks in advance!
Hi Michael,
Can you share a bit more about your goals for using Plans? Is it about relationship management, or donor recognition? Or donor benefits?
Megan
Yes?The impetuous is definitely donor recognition (and tracking relationship management in those asks), but we're lumping moneys from different Tessitura Funds as part of the same recognition programme. So money from Major Gifts and Sponsorships and Memberships might all count for a given donor.So hence why I'm leaning towards using a distinct campaign and tagging the contributions manually.So guess it's 2 questions: 1) is it technically possible to do in Tessitura; and 2) is it a good idea.
Michael,
1) Yes, it is technically possible, we combine many campaign donations into one campaign, although we usually just use one that is already pre-existing where we expect most of the funds will go. You could technically set up a dummy campaign, the only down fall I see is that donations will not automatically pick up that campaign because I'm assuming you will not have any funds attached to that campaign.
2) Is it a good idea? That's more difficult to answer and depends on your unique needs. This would allow you to see all plans associated with this 'dummy' campaign under campaign and in plan reports. However, this will not allow you to use membership as T.C. Brown says below because a membership is not attached to a Plan it is attached to a campaign through donations made to the funds in that campaign. You could simply create a membership organization (Campaigns-->Membership) for this new recognition program and attach that membership to each campaign you want to feed into it.
Thanks. If you are looking to recognize people over a twelve-month period of giving, you should take a look at memberships. If you're looking more at a season view, I'll recommend what we did here which is to build attributes that look at fiscal year and campaign categories. Tessitura Technical Services built them for us and they have been super effective and require very little maintenance.
In short, the patron's "Listing level overall" attribute generates nightly, and looks at fiscal year giving to annual fund and special events (campaign categories), and takes whichever overall level is higher from the current season, previous season, and the upcoming season. There are many ways you can approach the logic, but this is what we did and it has worked extremely well. We have an Override attribute that can be manually added when needed, but I find that we use it pretty minimally, and with a quick review every quarter, we're good to go.
You can add contributions from multiple campaigns to a single plan, but being fully manual leaves a lot of room for error.
Best,Megan