Hi all,
I recently started a new position at PlayMakers Repertory Company which is housed at UNC Chapel Hill. PlayMakers uses Tessitura primarily for ticketing/box office procedures and the occassional gift received via our website. However, all of other donations (via mail, phone, etc) are recorded through the University's CRM system. Right now, there is a manual system in place to pull an output set of any gifts that come in online and are processed by Tess so that they may be uploaded ot the University system and recorded in a donor's profile but it is somewhat arduous for all parties involved. We'd also like to be able to have the data flow both ways so that we can view giving and ticketing history in one place (that's the point, after all!). Has anyone else worked within a university system and/or at an organization that is housed under a larger company and has words of wisdom that they can share? Any thoughts are appreciated!
Hello, Amelia!
We're in a similar situation, where we sell tickets and process donations through Tessitura, then send the donation information to our University's CRM. We just started in 2017, so we're still working on improving our process, but this is what we currently do:
- Once a month, we run a query to pull all gifts in specific funds with donor information and put it in a format that the University can import with a marker that indicates it came from our system
- Twice per month, we run a report from the University's system that has all gifts that were processed on their end for our unit, excluding the ones we sent to them, then we import those into Tessitura using the Contribution Import Utility into specific funds/channels/sources, which are excluded from the once a month send and have all-zero GLs.
I'm working on turning the query into a custom report in SSRS so we can schedule it, and we're working on standardizing the University CRM to Tessitura process to make it a bit more automated. Our biggest issue with importing the gifts into Tessitura right now is to get Memberships to work out nicely, but otherwise it works fairly well for adding gifts to people's records, generating acknowledgements, and having the information in one place.
I hope someone else has insight on a less manual process! I'd be happy to chat about our process more if you're interested.